Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  “I understand. What if this quantum leap involved an abstract ability—say, telepathic perception or something like that. Could that happen?”

  “You mean the ability to project images directly from one brain to another? In theory, at least, it’s not impossible.”

  “And wouldn’t the large cortex of the Neanderthal provide the physical equipment for such an ability?”

  “Again, speaking theoretically, yes. But there’s a problem. We know from humans that much of the cortex is already mortgaged—it’s for language.”

  “What if they didn’t have language? Then they would have a large brain, larger than ours, just lying dormant.”

  “But there’s no reason for them not to develop language. As a means of communication it’s preferable because it endures. You can write it down. It can even outlast the speaker. You and I never met Shakespeare but we can hear him talk, so to speak.”

  “What if something prevented them from developing language?”

  “It’s difficult to imagine what could arrest language development. I can only think of one such cause.”

  “What?”

  “High altitude.”

  Eagleton spun a quarter circle in his chair. “Explain.”

  “Mountain climbers get their judgments scrambled—that’s not a new observation. But new research is tying it to speech. A neuroscientist at Brown, Philip Lieberman, has been looking at the cognitive effects of lack of oxygen. His theory is that it impairs the part of the brain involved in sequencing movements, including the motion made by the tongue, lips, and larynx. The basal gan­glia are deprived of oxygen, and the syntax of spoken language goes out the window. Hence the thoughts come out jumbled.”

  “So over the long term,” said Eagleton quietly, “a species in such an environment might turn away from language and develop something like telepathy as a compensation.”

  “In theory—only in theory—yes, that’s not impossible.”

  “And what if this ability served a vital function for a group that was constantly fearful, constantly in retreat? What if it also allowed each member to act as a lookout—a kind of automatic early warning system for the entire tribe?”

  “Well, then it would have an added value that would contribute to the likelihood of its continuing. In that case the process of genetic drift would be reinforced by Darwinian selection, which would tend to accentuate the trait—to solidify it, so to speak. But what are you driving at?”

  “Nothing at all. We’re simply having a theoretical discussion. I’m interested in what you said about different groups of Neanderthal. How does something like that come about?”

  “Well, this is all theory, mind you, but some event intervened to split apart the overall population into subgroups. Probably the Ice Age. We know that those in Western Europe developed into the classic Neanderthal and eventually died out. In short, their brook went dry. Those elsewhere may have become more like us. It’s called sapienization. Or they may have survived for a while cut off in their little backwater and developing some peculiar traits through genetic drift. The trail runs cold in that part of the world referred to as ‘western Asia.’

  “Western Asia? Where’s that?”

  “It’s a strange term that to this day people use in writing about Neanderthals. It takes in that whole huge region from the Black Sea through parts of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. A lot of it is unexplored.”

  Abruptly, again without so much as a thank-you, Eagleton dismissed Schwartzbaum. He didn’t need him anymore. He had reached the decision he was groping for. Van had not been heard from for more than three weeks. It was time to send in Kane.

  Susan and Dark-Eye walked to the riverbank, he with his bony hand on top of hers like a hawk clutching its prey. She felt a strange, throbbing sense of power emanating from him, as if he generated some kind of psychic voltage. She could not tell if she was leading him or he was guiding her.

  Longface met them and walked backward ahead of them, his head held low. When they entered the clearing of the hut, Matt was there, as were three or four hominids. Kellicut was working on something in a corner, his tools scattered around him: a knife, the canteen, the medical kit with its blue-and-white lid open. When he saw them, he carefully laid his work on a cloth and rose.

  “Glad you’re here. He’s not looking good. We don’t have much time.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “He’s got that gash on his head and a smashed knee, but he’s also got a wound in his side. I can’t be sure but my guess is that he was injured some days ago and has been traveling, so I think his main problem is loss of blood. We’re going to have to give him a transfusion.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Badly is the answer. We’ll be lucky to get a significant amount of blood into him, and with all the germs around here, he’ll be lucky if he survives. But it’s his only hope.”

  “Who’s the donor?”

  Kellicut looked over at Longface, still rocking slowly.

  “And him? What’s he for?” Susan gestured with her head toward Dark-Eye, who had not yet let go of her hand. She hesitated to pry his hand off, as if it were some kind of leech that had to be detached carefully.

  “I’m hoping that we can explain what we’re doing to him some­how, and maybe he can communicate it to the others. He’s the only one who can take it in. Also”—Kellicut turned back to his work— “it might be handy to have him around if this turns out badly.”

  Susan joined Matt at the fire and watched as Kellicut huddled with Longface and Dark-Eye, making sounds and gestures. At one point he reached over and opened the boy’s eyes; at another he jabbed himself with the knife, drawing a stream of blood out of his forearm. It seemed doubtful that he was getting the idea across. Meanwhile the water was boiling in the canteen. She and Matt used it to sterilize a long rubber tube from the medical kit and some rags, and brought the equipment over to where the boy lay.

  Somehow Kellicut had convinced Longface to lie down on a bed of woven branches near his son. Now he took a hypodermic sy­ringe, cleaned it with boiling water, and pushed the plunger down. With a knife he made a small hole at the upper end of the syringe, enlarging it gradually until it was round. He stuck one end of the rubber tube into it, held it up and turned it in the air, admiring his handiwork, then handed the other end of the tube to Susan. “Hold this too,” he ordered, giving her the canteen. He knelt beside Long-face, dabbed his inner arm with a rag soaked in alcohol, and jabbed the needle into a vein, pulling the plunger back slowly so that the chamber filled with the dark red liquid. Seeing it made Susan feel a kinship with the hominids. Prick me, do I not bleed? she thought.

  “Ah-ha!” Kellicut exclaimed as the plunger passed by the hole he had carved and Longface’s blood began to flow down the tube as neatly as a stream detoured by a makeshift dam. “It works!” he cried, so enthusiastically that she realized he had not been sure it would.

  “Keep the other end in the canteen,” he cautioned, “and hold it low. We’ve got to keep it coming.” Susan could see the tube darken slowly as the stream advanced. She held the tube in the mouth of the canteen and gripped the bottom with her other hand.

  They stayed this way as the canteen filled. Though the flow was steady, it took a long time. Suddenly Susan gave a little cry, as blood spilled over the edge. Kellicut rushed over and grabbed it from her. He extracted the needle from Longface, then produced a Band-Aid from the kit to cover the prick in his arm. “Good as new,” he barked. Longface rose up on one elbow to cast a suspi­cious glance at the Band-Aid and then slowly lay back again, clos­ing his eyes.

  Kellicut motioned Matt and Susan to the boy’s side. “This part is going to be trickier,” he said. “Hold the blood as high as you can”—he raised her arm over her head—”and keep it there.” He took out the rubber tubing, used a bit of plastic to improvise a funnel feeding into it, handed it to Matt, and raised his arm too. “When I give the word,
pour the blood in,” he said. “If there’s an air bubble in the tube, we’re sunk.” He lifted the syringe, pulled the plunger back as far as it would go, stuck the needle into a vein on the boy’s arm, and pushed the plunger forward a couple of cen­timeters, taking care not to move it past the hole. It worked: Slowly blood began flowing down the tube like a plunging thermometer.

  “I should have been a bush doctor.” Kellicut’s voice swelled with pride. “It makes you feel like some sort of god.”

  Afterward they bandaged the boy’s knee and forehead, covered him with the spare clothes again, and left him sleeping next to his father. The other hominids stayed, standing around the hut, uncertain what to do and looking at Dark-Eye as if seeking guidance.

  That evening, sitting around the fire, Kellicut was looking so pleased with himself Susan seized the opportunity to draw him out. “Tell us about the other ones,” she implored. “What did you call them?”

  “Renegades.”

  “That’s it.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I learned about them shortly after I ar­rived. I haven’t seen them, of course—I doubt I’d be here to tell the tale if I had. But I’ve been able to pick up bits and pieces, enough to come up with some theories. As you might expect, they’re greatly feared.”

  “Where do they come from?” Matt asked.

  “Right here—this very same valley. For all we know there may be other tribes scattered throughout these mountains. God only knows what they’re like. But the renegades come from this valley. They’ve increased over time—who knows how long, generations certainly. Maybe even hundreds of years.”

  “But how?”

  “They’re rejects, outcasts, pariahs. It’s simple, really.”

  “Well, maybe you could indulge us and explain it.”

  “Every so often someone comes along who is born different. Antisocial—or worse maybe—a criminal. There’s something pathological about him, genetically different. He doesn’t fit in, he breaks the rules, he flouts the taboos. It’s a phenomenon that occurs in every population. Spontaneous misfits. The Sioux called them “contraries,” people who do everything backward, even riding their horses facing to the rear. Every society produces them, every tribe. From the point of view of an evolutionary biologist, you might say the society has to if it is to survive. It’s a way of ex­perimenting, of trying out new models if you like.

  “And this is especially true of tribes that are close-knit, socially cohesive, as this one is because of their special faculty. The ability to share perceptions makes them into a single unit, so that any be­havior that’s antisocial or even out of the ordinary assumes an as­pect that is threatening to the communal whole. Therefore the tribe draws together to expel the rebel—or the rebel chooses exile on his own. Who knows how the process really works? The group cleanses itself, gets rid of the troublesome element, and he goes off into the sunset and that’s that; he’s never talked of again. Except there’s one fly in the ointment.”

  “What’s that?” Matt asked.

  “He disappears but he’s not really gone,” interjected Susan.

  “Exactly. He goes off into the wilds alone and learns to survive. He leaves Eden. Eventually another one joins him. Over time their numbers grow. At first it’s a small ragged band, but it builds and builds. Soon you have an entire subcolony of outcasts. When they are joined by women, it becomes reproductive in its own right. Then it turns into a competitive population.”

  “How many are there?” asked Susan.

  “I have no idea. But it’s not the numbers that count; it’s the spirit. It’s the driving force. It’s who they are.”

  “They’re brutes!” exclaimed Susan, as the image of Rudy’s blood in the snow flooded her brain.

  “Susan!” chided Kellicut. He turned to look at her. “You’ve got it exactly wrong. How can you be so stupid? You’ve been to their cave; you’ve seen how they live and what they’ve accomplished.”

  “What they’ve accomplished?”

  “Think, for God’s sake! For openers, they hunt. That means they have to cooperate, have to work together, have to plan attacks. It takes six or seven men to bring down a large animal, so they have to assign different tasks—one to set a snare, another to beat the bushes, all of that. They have to think ahead, to actually project themselves into the future. They eat meat, so their protein intake is higher. That makes them stronger. They cook the meat over fire to make it taste good and to preserve it. They wear skins, they decorate their cave. There’s a division of labor, with men out hunting and women staying home to tend the hearth and raise the children. They’re beginning to live in family groups. They have a social hierarchy.”

  “They kill,” Susan said bluntly.

  “Yes, they kill. Unfortunately, killing seems to be a part of it. Maybe it’s a necessary way station on the road to civilization. Because that’s what we’re talking about here: civilization. Don’t kid yourself. They represent a higher form, superior in every way. Re­member what you learned at Harvard? What are the first signs, the first stirrings of communal life? Cave art, spiritualism, proto-urbanization, social stratification. It’s all up there with those mountain dwellers, not down here with these lotus eaters. Don’t you see? The renegades represent a giant leap forward, the kind of thing Homo sapiens went through eons ago. It’s evolution working its will. They’re catching up. It’s one of those sudden vaults forward that occur maybe once in a hundred thousand years, and we’re right here. We’re present at the creation.”

  “Why don’t they attack our group if they’re killers and have superior Martial skills?” asked Matt. “They could wipe them out in a minute.”

  Kellicut fixed an eye on him. “I’m not really sure. For one thing, they’re separated by the cemetery. There’s a taboo in traversing it, as you know, but that’s hardly a convincing explanation. Perhaps there’s a sort of undeclared truce, a stasis in the relationship between the two. After all, the renegades need our friends here to increase their number; this is the mother tribe. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of time until they do attack. Darwin would be instructive now.”

  “What you describe hardly sounds like paradise,” said Matt. “If they’re being kept as a breeder population, it’s a contrived Eden. There’s a darkness at the center.”

  Kellicut paused a moment, then sounded more somber. “Certainly there are worrying signs. I think they are beginning to pick our Neanderthals off from time to time. They’re ruthless, as you witnessed, and are in the thrall of a demagogue. There’s a fright­ened screech associated with him, a sound something like ‘Kee­wak.’ He’s the strongest of the strong, and he has led them to worship a godhead of some sort.”

  “Ruthless isn’t the word. They had human skulls hanging up there,” said Matt.

  Just then the hominids squatting on their haunches nearby suddenly jumped up, wailing and throwing their heads back to let out long, piercing howls. Their movements were so disjointed that it took a few moments for the three to figure out that it was a display of grief. Then they all had the same thought.

  They ran to the hut by the river, where a large group of hominids was milling about with an air of aimlessness that suggested trouble. Kellicut pushed his way through, ran over to the boy, and pulled off the clothes. His eyes were closed but his chest cavity was rising and falling. Kellicut felt his pulse: slow but steady. There was no crisis.

  “Look behind you!” said Matt. Kellicut turned around and saw that Longface was still lying on the bed of woven branches, inert and pale, his body stiff and his eyes closed. Kellicut walked over and lifted his hand, large and dirty and with the thumb pushed into a stub from a lifetime of picking fruit and berries. It was already beginning to harden, with the half-clenched fingers forming a claw.

  “My God,” Kellicut said. “Do you know what happened? He sacrificed himself. He was giving his blood to his son so that his son would live, so logically he thought this meant he would die. And because he thought it, he did die.
”

  At that moment the crowd parted and Dark-Eye appeared, his hair wild and his yellow-white eye staring off to one side luminously. The crowd fell silent and pulled back as he reached into a wooden scabbard that Kellicut and the others had never seen be­fore and pulled out a long sliver of stone flaked to a sharp point. He bent down, cradled Longface’s head with one arm, quickly in­serted the flint into an eye socket near the bridge of the nose, and with a swift, practiced motion pried out the eyeball. He did the same to the other eye and then held them aloft, white orbs stream­ing dark strands and blood, and gave out a long, piercing, high-pitched scream that chilled them to the bone.

  When one dies, all die a little. The tribe that sees and experiences as one is diminished when a single pair of eyes passes into the night, the way a tightly woven tapestry is harmed when a single string unravels.

  Longface’s burial started immediately, from the moment Dark-Eye slipped the two eyeballs into a pouch dangling from his neck. A huge bonfire was constructed in the middle of the village and everything was thrown into the flames, not only branches but even makeshift beds and crude beams holding up the huts. In their grief, little was spared, and the flames rose ten feet into the air, scorch­ing the leaves of nearby trees.

  The entire village turned out, men, women, and children, and for the first time Susan realized how large the tribe was—several thousand at least. There were hominids she had never seen before, including some older ones, both men and women, who must have been leading hermitic existences in the far reaches of the valley, who gathered in response to an unspoken collective summons. All deaths were critical, but Longface’s was not an ordinary death; he was an elder of the tribe.

  His naked body was elevated on a four-foot-high bier of logs strapped together by vines and laced with red poppies, that was placed about twenty feet from the fire. Behind it six young men sat cross-legged with hollow logs on their laps, tapping them with sticks in a syncopated, doleful rhythm. Others moved around them in a dance, raising their hands and legs slowly in contorted postures, almost as if they were under water. The fire was fed by children until Dark-Eye appeared again, this time his good eye blindfolded, carrying a shell. The children pulled burning logs and embers from the fire to form a path and he trod upon it, betraying no sign of pain, until he reached the fire’s edge and placed the shell in the flames.