Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “Lester,” Gideon said, appalled, “give me a break. Why do we want to do a book launch there? These are my colleagues, they’ll—”

  “Hey, get off your high horse. This’s got nothing to do with you. You’re not my only author, you know. You know a guy named Rowley Boyd?”

  “Uh-huh, I’ve met him a few times.” Rowley, Gideon remembered, was the pleasant, unpretentious, somewhat bookish director of the archaeological museum in Gibraltar.

  “Well, he’s been piddling around with a book about Gibraltar Boy for almost three years, and we finally squeezed it out of him— pub date early October. You have any objections to my giving a book party for him?”

  “None whatever. If it’s okay with him, it’s okay with me.”

  “It’s more than okay with him. He’s overjoyed. He’s thrilled. Some people appreciate the efforts made on their behalf.”

  “Well, I’m glad for him, Lester, and for you. I hope the book’s a big success.”

  He said good-bye and hung up with another sigh. “According to Lester, a hundred newspapers have picked the article up. It’s going to be all over the place. LeMoyne and the others are going to have a ball with this, Julie. So are my students. Life is going to be hell for me for a while.” All the same, he couldn’t help chuckling. “Still, I guess it’s pretty funny, in a way.”

  "It is, really. ’It’ll leave Piltdown in the dust,’” she said, shaking her head. “Quite a statement.”

  He grimaced. “I really wish you wouldn’t keep repeating that.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Gotta go. Well, you know what I think? I think you should think about what Abe might have said at a time like this.”

  “That’s a good idea.” Abe was Abraham Goldstein, the impoverished, persecuted, Jewish immigrant from Russia who had made an improbable place for himself in America as an eminent professor of anthropology. At an advanced age, as Gideon’s major professor at the University of Wisconsin, he had been Gideon’s mentor in life as in anthropology, and his presence was still very much missed.

  Gideon smiled. “So what would Abe have said?”

  “ ‘Oy,’ ” said Julie, draining her coffee as she stood up.

  He responded with a full-throated laugh and lifted his cup. “I’ll drink to that.”

  TWO

  IT wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Inasmuch as he didn’t have a teaching load during the summer session, there were few students to contend with, and the faculty that he ran into on his visits to campus tended to be sparse. Oh, Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne couldn’t resist his little jab (“Don’t tell me . . . please don’t tell me . . . that you’re going to . . . gasp . . . tell us that there is no . . . gasp . . . Bigfoot!”) and one of his better graduate students, depressingly, swallowed the article hook, line, and sinker, and asked if he could possibly be let in on the secret. He would tell no one, he promised.

  All in all, however, Gideon thought he’d gotten away cheaply. And so, a few days later, he was in a characteristically upbeat mood when he picked up Julie at park headquarters to head out for an Italian dinner in town. “Julie, could you get away a day early on the Gibraltar trip?” he asked once she’d slid into the car and he’d gotten his warm, wifely peck on the cheek. “The foundation will pick up any costs for changing flights, and also put us up for an extra night at the hotel.”

  “Sure, I could do that,” she said, obviously liking the idea of another day in exotic Gibraltar, to which neither of them had been, and another night at the Rock Hotel, reputedly its most luxurious lodgings. “But what’s up? Is the conference starting earlier?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said, pulling the Camry out of the lot and turning right onto East Park Avenue, “but there’s going to be a small dinner symposium in honor of Ivan Gunderson the evening before it officially opens. Very informal, just five speakers. Everybody who had any association with Gibraltar Boy or the First Family—well, not the hired locals and student workers on the dig, but all the professionals. You know some of the others—Audrey Godwin-Pope, Pru McGinnis—and I’ve been asked to be part of the program.”

  “Oh, that’s great. Congratulations.”

  “Oh, well, it’s nothing special. It’s a testimonial dinner, really; nothing scholarly.”

  “Explain something to me, Gideon. You’ve always said that Gunderson was a better TV personality than he was an archaeologist.”

  “True. He’s intelligent, he’s articulate—eloquent, in fact—and he has a quick mind, but he’s just not a well-trained scientist, although he obviously thinks he is. He’s very good at explaining archaeology to a lay audience, but nobody in the field takes his work as an archaeologist very seriously anymore. Never did, really.”

  “Okay, that’s my question. If nobody takes his work seriously, why are you holding a symposium in his honor?”

  “Well, first of all, because he’s a genuinely nice guy, a real, old-fashioned gentleman—kind, helpful, not full of himself like some TV celebrities—and you can’t help liking him as a person—you’ll see— but mainly because of his very real contributions to archaeology. See, it’s the Horizon Foundation that’s putting it on, and putting the five of us up—”

  “And spouses, let’s not forget about spouses.”

  “And spouses, and they’re doing it largely to show their thanks for all he’s done for the field, and especially for the foundation itself. Ivan’s getting to the end of the road now—he’s over ninety. And this is a perfect opportunity. It’s the fifth anniversary of the finding of Gibraltar Boy and Gibraltar Woman, and in a very real way he’s responsible for that. And the odds are he won’t be around for the tenth anniversary.”

  “That’s one of the things I’m confused about. I thought it was, what’s his name, Adrian something, that found them.”

  “Yes, sure, Adrian Vanderwater was actually running the dig, but—” He glanced over at Julie. “Didn’t I already explain this once?”

  “I think possibly you did,” Julie said casually.

  “Or twice?”

  “Could be. Would you mind going through it again?”

  “Will you promise to pay attention this time?”

  “I was paying attention. I just fell asleep, that’s all. You can hardly blame that on me.”

  She laughed; that sudden, two-note chirp of giggle that made her nose crinkle, something he found unbearably coy in other women, but in Julie, he thought it was absolutely adorable. (He knew no men whose noses crinkled; now why was that? Was there a sex-linked gene involved? Perhaps a master’s thesis for one of his students? )

  As always, it made him smile. He put a forefinger on the tip of her nose. “You’re just lucky you’ve got that twitchy little quadratus labii superioris,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t get away—”

  “If you think you can distract me by talking dirty, forget it. Now tell me about Ivan Gunderson.”

  “Okay, one more time . . .”

  Ivan Samuel Gunderson was a throwback and very probably the last of his kind. In the late nineteenth century they had been common, these men of wealth, amateur archaeologists who dug the ancient sites of Egypt or Europe or Mesopotamia. But since the 1930s, the field had become institutionalized. Excavations were funded by universities or foundations and conducted by formally trained PhDs with ever narrower specialties. Amateur, self-taught archaeologists were no longer welcome. More than that, they were kept at a distance.

  Except for Ivan S. Gunderson. Without even a bachelor’s degree in archaeology, he had been a well-known figure in European and Middle Eastern prehistory for four decades. A self-made multimillionaire—as a young man he had speculated with fabulous success in South American tin mining—he was unique in being able to purchase the land on which promising archaeological sites lay, rather than having to wangle permission from reluctant landowners to excavate on their property. This he did, freely and often, so that it wasn’t uncommon for him to be working two or three sites at a time, using local people as workers an
d overseers. Where permission from government officials was necessary, particularly in the Middle East, his freehandedness with money came in particularly helpful.

  His slapdash, untrained approach to excavating naturally enough made the professionals nervous, but since he was working on his own land, there was nothing they could do. Besides, he was extremely popular with them, having endeared himself to them with a practice that outdid anything the nineteenth-century amateurs ever did. Quick to lose interest if a site failed to spark his restless imagination, he would often donate the land to a university or professional organization for them to pursue the dig on their own. A great deal of useful data and many Stone Age materials that now resided in museums had come from his generosity. One of his main beneficiaries through the years had been the Chicago-based Horizon Foundation for Anthropological Research, the highly respected organization with which Gideon had had a long informal association. It was this foundation that was sponsoring the dinner in his honor.

  Gunderson’s unsophisticated theoretical spoutings, while always politely received by his fellow archaeologists (everyone wanted to stay on his good side; you never knew when the next donated site was coming), were privately regarded as naïve, erratic, and generally half baked. His specialty was the Neanderthals, who had always been a focal point for dispute among paleoanthropologists. Until the 1990s the fight had been over whether or not we humans were directly descended from them. Gunderson had been at the forefront of those who believed we were.

  But in the 1990s the DNA scientists, having found a way to extract mitochondrial DNA from prehistoric skeletons, had pretty well resolved the matter.

  We weren’t.

  The ground shifted. Now the question became whether humans— Homo sapiens—and Neanderthals—Homo neanderthalensis—had interbred at all, or were distinctly separate species that did not— could not—interbreed. Gunderson put down one cudgel and picked up another. Handsome, silver haired, and articulate (“a combination of Alistair Cooke and Walter Cronkite,” as one TV magazine put it) he became one of the most publicly visible proponents of “admixture theory”—that is, the theory that Neanderthals and humans had intermittently interbred during the four or five thousand years that they coexisted in Europe before the Neanderthals died out altogether about 24,000 years ago. Ivan Gunderson’s support notwithstanding, this was a perfectly respectable theory held by many reputable scientists. As was the opposing one; that is, that they were separate species who never interbred. Whether they had or hadn’t was of course of no importance at all, and even less interest, to 99.9999 percent of the civilized world, but it was an issue that had sharply split the scholars of the Paleolithic era—the Stone Age. Invectives had been hurled and, on one notable occasion, fists had flown, as gray-bearded academics fought it out at their conventions.

  Then, five years ago, the matter was settled, at least in the popular mind; through Gunderson’s doing, no less. He had been excavating several Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sites in Spain and Gibraltar at the time, commuting between them as needed. The Gibraltar site, a coastal rock shelter known as the Europa Point Cave, had come to his attention when the owner of the land, bulldozing the area in a crazy scheme to turn it into a mushroom farm, had uncovered some Stone Age tools, soon determined to be Neanderthal. When Gunderson had offered to buy this promising land from him, the man had jumped at the chance to rid himself of it, and Gunderson and his crew of local workmen had started digging.

  Two months’ work turned up a few more stone tools, some butchered ibex bones, and a handful of charcoal dated at 26,000 years before the present. No human remains. Mildly interesting, but not exciting enough for Gunderson; just one more meager Neanderthal encampment, little different from the many others that had been found. He offered it to Horizon, which jumped at the chance to excavate at Europa Point, and the dig thereupon proceeded in orderly, highly professional fashion for some months under their oversight, with the eminent Adrian Vanderwater of the University of California in charge of work in the field. Their efforts were generally rewarding. Two more Neanderthal burials were found, along with more tools and butchered bones, and an unusual pendant (if that’s what it was) carved from a wolf’s tooth.

  Highly satisfactory results. But then a truly remarkable find was made. In a sediment-filled hanging crevice along one wall of the shelter, the ceremonial burial of a female and a young child was unearthed, somewhat scattered and with fewer than half the bones still present, but with the remains of the female’s skeletal arms tenderly cradling the remains of the child to her skeletal breast. The conclusion was inescapable: they were mother and child. Nothing like this had ever been seen before in a Stone Age burial. The poignant photographs, retouched for emphasis but essentially accurate, that were shown on TV news programs from pole to pole, soon established them as Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy: the First Family.

  That would have been extraordinary enough, but when the bones were sent to the Horizon Foundation’s anthropology laboratory for detailed study by an interdisciplinary team, the results were even more amazing. The three-person team, of which Gideon was the lead scientist, issued a thorough, meticulous report indicating that the female, who was in her mid-twenties (an old woman in Paleolithic terms), was not Neanderthal at all, but human. This sent a shock wave through the world of prehistoric archaeology: it had now been irrefutably shown for the first time that humans and Neanderthals could and did live together, at least in this one case, and that the human—an outsider, an alien female—had been ceremonially buried with the love and respect due a member of the clan. (The ceremonial nature of the burial was established by red stains on the bones, indicating that the bodies had been wrapped in an ocher-stained skin, the pigment of which had been absorbed by the skeletons as the shroud decayed.)

  As spectacular as that was, it was the examination of Gibraltar Boy that opened up even more stunning avenues of conjecture and dispute. The child, it seemed, could arguably be described as combining characteristics of both Neanderthals and humans. Despite the intriguing possibilities that this raised, Gideon was determined that the team’s report would not be a source of controversy—and especially of controversy based on insufficient data. Just the facts, ma’am. No theoretical stands were taken, no sweeping conclusions were drawn.

  Of course, others did draw them. To the proponents of human-Neanderthal interbreeding, here was concrete evidence that mating had occurred. A few—a very few—other skeletons had been found that seemed to exhibit similar blends of human and Neanderthal traits, but the noninterbreeding proponents had argued them away as mere variations of either Neanderthals or humans, well within the range of variation to be found in any species.

  But never had a find like this been made in such affecting circumstances. That the two skeletons were mother and son, few who had seen the photographs doubted. And what could the boy’s human-Neanderthal mixture of traits (if such it was) mean other than that he was a hybrid, that he had mixed parentage? His mother was indisputably human. His father had to have been Neanderthal. A human woman had mated with a Neanderthal male many thousands of years ago, and they had produced a child, quickly dubbed Gibraltar Boy in both the popular and scientific press. In actuality, it was a misnomer; one that had always bothered Gideon. The child was only about four years old, too young to determine the sex from the available bones, and he had clearly indicated as much in the report. Nevertheless, some reporter’s appellation of “Gibraltar Boy” had caught the popular imagination, and it had stuck. Gibraltar Boy he was, and Gibraltar Boy he would always be, and the objections of a few stuffy pedants like Gideon Oliver weren’t going to change matters.

  In any case, as far as the human-Neanderthal-admixture-theory people were concerned, the argument was settled. When you were talking about things that had happened more than twenty millennia ago, how could you ask for more solid proof than this? In the popular mind as well, the theory was now a fact, but scientists were still divided. The no-mixing contingent suffered
quite a few defectors, but many refused to throw in the towel. The embattled true believers fought on, claiming that the measurements were inconclusive and fragmentary (which they were); the so-called human traits were ambiguous, mere within-species variations. Not all Neanderthals looked alike, not all chimpanzees looked alike, and not all human beings looked alike. The boy was, like his mother, a Neanderthal, pure and simple. A little less chunky than most, maybe, but Neanderthal all the same.

  So what was a human woman doing buried in a Neanderthal rock shelter with a Neanderthal child in her arms? Who knew? Maybe she was the original nanny. Captured as a slave, perhaps. Or maybe she was an outcast from her own group who had been accepted into the Neanderthal fold. But then why was she buried with the child? Who could say? But to build from this scanty, questionable evidence, the conclusion that they were human mother and human-Neanderthal offspring? No, they would need a lot more evidence before they accepted that.

  In the larger world, however, there was no longer any debate, especially after Who We Are: The Legacy of the First Family, The Learning Channel’s highest-rated series ever, was shown, hosted by Gunderson himself at his urbane, avuncular best. In the popular mind, intergroup mixing between humans and Neanderthals was now a fact. (You couldn’t say “interspecies mixing” anymore, as Gunderson lucidly, if a bit simplistically, explained, because the biological definition of species turned on the idea that only members of the same species could interbreed.) The fight was over.

  The reverberations were felt not only in the world of prehistoric anthropology, but throughout the social sciences. For one thing, the theory that the Neanderthals had become extinct because their rivals, the more advanced Homo sapiens, had wiped them off the face of the earth by either ruthless, outright aggression or by outcompeting them for scarce resources took a major hit. Proponents of this theory, while unconvinced by the find, were forced to retreat to their ivory towers, muttering and licking their wounds. More broadly, the study of the relationships between more and less advanced societies was given new life. And champions of multiculturalism had a new and appealing poster child. (If Neanderthals and early humans could get along well enough to produce a child, and if the human mother of that child was lovingly taken in by the child’s extended Neanderthal family, then surely we humans of merely different skin colors—genetically so much closer to each other—could hope to get along too . . . could we not?)