'How's life at the top?’ Bushwalker asked of her son.
'It's much easier chipping rocks than shaping a troop,’ he said wryly. ‘I miss the old days.'
'You don't seem to be doing too badly,’ his dam observed.
A smirk crossed her wrinkled face. Toolmaker never wanted the chieftainship of Home-rock foisted on him. From an early age he displayed a propensity for pebble-toolmaking, a proficiency Bushwalker suspected may have rubbed off on him in the womb from the abnormal amount of time she spent in Rockshaper's workshop during her second pregnancy instilling in others her passion for tool usage. Her son would have happily lived out his days chiselling flint, but she had schemed grander plans for her talented boy.
It occurred to Bushwalker that the best way to avoid dispute and indecision over what individual would become next Upright chief after her death would be to name her inheritor before she died. And who better than her own son? He resisted the notion, throwing his mother's own stubbornness back in her face, but she wore him down until the middle-aged male eventually handed over the manufacture of the now widely used stone tools to the gruff female his nagging mother had selected that he train up to be his replacement as troop artisan. Toolmaker was made chieftain at the age of sixteen to popular acclaim. Bushwalker then naturally took a backseat to proudly let her son rule, though she was not above giving him advice on occasion whether he asked for her counsel or not. It was what he jokingly referred to as ‘motherly interference'. She countered that by threatening to tell everyone that he had meant to be born a girl, and invariably got her own way.
Bushwalker sighed contentedly. Under her chieftainship, the Home-rockers survived against the odds. With Toolmaker leading, they prospered. The hominins clumsily aped her use of Rockshaper's inventions with mixed results, despite her keenness to have her followers adopt her tool bearing ways. Toolmaker took her teachings a step further and led by example. He patiently educated his tribe, advocating creativity and freethinking, and in time the gracile troop followed suit by way of the upcoming generations. The young are always less resistant to new ideas than their stuck-in-the-mud elders. Encouragement of that change was merely an extension of his mother's farsightedness, which in turn stemmed from the imagination Rockshaper had possessed: the classic domino effect.
Life was not all sweetness and light. The Uprights continued to contend with drought, famine and disease, plus periodic Sabretooth predation, though the latter mercifully dwindled to infrequent cases of man-eating and not a repeat of the single-minded harassment performed by the incinerated panther. It did appear that Tsor mind habituation withered over time, but only Gurgon-Rha knew if it would completely wilt and dead lizard-men tell no tales. Births were up, though mortality remained at a predictably high percentage. The man-apes would not benefit from longevity for another million plus years yet.
There is always an exception to every rule and Bushwalker had thus far defied the law of averages to reach her thirties. She was the eldest gracile to have so far lived and wore it in her brittle bones. ‘How's my granddaughter? Family mattered greatly to the old-timer.
'Precocious as ever,’ answered her son.
'You should bring her up to visit me more often.'
'She wears you out too much, mother.'
'Nonsense, boy. Having the little tyke underfoot makes me feel less old.'
Toolmaker stifled a rejoinder. Why did each parent possess the ghastly knack of making their grown offspring feel like a babe in the woods? His only consolation was that one day his turn would come to reduce his own daughter from adult size into child with a well-timed word or phrase whenever she got too big for her feet.
'Bushclimber is quite the little organiser,’ he said. ‘I left her playing tag with her friends and she was insisting on being “it".'
'That's my girl,’ smiled Bushwalker. ‘She'll make quite a chieftainess, I warrant.'
Bushwalker persistently impressed upon her son the wisdom of making the leadership of Home-rock a hereditary affair. Keeping it in the family became the catchphrase of the new style of hominin rule bereft of the cumbersome Caverunner designation. It was just the latest improvement wrought by the ball of change Bushwalker's innovativeness set in motion.
Matters correspondingly altered on the culinary front. Common use of the pebble-tools allowed the Uprights to expand their dietary repertoire. They now regularly scavenged meat scraps from the kills of the larger predators and cracked the leftover bones with rock hammers to extract the fatty, nutritious marrow sealed inside, their escalating carnivorousness gaining them a firmer foothold on the evolutionary ladder. A high protein diet of meat would fuel the future enlargement of ancestral human brains, necessitating devouring even more flesh, which in turn expanded consciousness in a self-perpetuating cycle of cerebral growth. Red meat, not fish, is brain food.
Also on the plus side, the sharp-edged stones bestowed upon the weakling man-apes a measure of self-protection that was sorely lacking. Bushwalker's experimental use of flame sadly remained a once off. Fire would not be taken up again and put to proper use by her ever-changing descendants for thousands of generations yet. In time crude hearths would warm chill caves and ward off the dark of night for those striving to become Man. Theirs was a long and winding road to humanity with countless pitfalls begun by a former Thunderfoot sixty four million years earlier, but what an evolutional journey it was proving to be!
Bushwalker heaved a restless sigh, prompting Toolmaker to ask, ‘Why so sad, mother?'
'Thinking of absent friends.'
Toolmaker understood only too well. Because Windchaser died from sickness before his first birthday, he had grown close to his ‘Uncle’ Ditchjumper. Despite his fervent protests, the veteran male was promoted to Bushwalker's deputy to fill the gap Windchaser's passing left and fared surprisingly well in the role. Obviously his inherent flagging confidence had been restored by his act of heroism in braving the firestorm out on the veldt so as to save his gifted leader.
When he was older and wiser, Toolmaker suspected a more intimate side to their relationship. He did not mind. Ditchjumper was a fine fellow, right up until the time of his death from old age shortly after Toolmaker turned seven. His mother never looked at another male in that way again; a fact that tore at his heart more than hers. Loneliness habitually brings with it ultimate sadness.
But Toolmaker's relationship with Ditchjumper ran deeper than the surface bond between a foster son and his surrogate father. Despite Bushwalker's startling insistence that Treeclimber's essence had impregnated her anew, that her son was a reincarnation of her rascally former love, Toolmaker perceived that the scarred male was his true biological father. It was not a difficult realisation to come by. Ditchjumper never strayed far from her side, especially when darkness fell and night terrors sundered Bushwalker's slumber. Adamant she had been immaculately seeded by Treeclimber, his mother pointedly refused to hear otherwise, her outlandish claim undisputed even by Ditchjumper who worked hard to keep her erroneous belief from the rest of the troop. Uprights were unready to accept the notion of a spirit world. Making a fuss, maliciously branding her cuckoo, would have jeopardised the stability of the improved Home-rock leadership structure. Perpetuating this pretence for the sake of her sanity as much as the troop's confidence in her, Toolmaker nonetheless interacted with his adopted uncle in a sonly fashion, an unspoken concession he sensed Ditchjumper valued greatly for the scant years they shared together.
Tenderly grasping his mother's hand just as her lids were drooping, Toolmaker softly asked, ‘Tell me about my “father".'
She snapped awake to gaze at her son with loving eyes. ‘The storyteller himself wants a story.’ Glossing over the failings of her amorous sweetheart, Bushwalker began as she always did when melancholy gripped her boy and he yearned to hear about his legendary roots. ‘Your father climbed trees...'
Epilogue
Trinil, Java Island, Indonesia, circa 900,000 years ago.
—
Catcher sniffed the elephant dung, inspecting afterwards the corresponding spoor farther along the muddy embankment. The steaming droppings were fresh like the tracks, no more than a few minutes old. A mother and calf had leisurely crossed the jungle waterway downstream. Tempting as hunting down pygmy elephants was, Catcher ignored the enticement. Hungering for monkey brains, he crept catlike into the surrounding bamboo forest in search of arboreal prey.
And in the nick of time. Moments later a monstrosity plodded fearlessly out of the waxy undergrowth, its flicking forked tongue testing the humid air for scents. A throwback to the reign of the long departed dinosaurs, twenty-four feet of monitor lizard judiciously considered what was more delectable on the jungle smorgasbord. Swivelling its bluntly snouted face in the direction Catcher was travelling in, the thousand pound reptile could have effortlessly put on a turn of astonishing speed and pinned its fellow predator against the obstructing foliage, making sushi out of the slighter beast using its wickedly recurved teeth and shredding claws. Opting for the meatier meal, the progenitor of the Komodo dragon slithered down the bank and into the dirty brown water, at home traversing earth or liquid. The monster fancied an elephantine snack!
Slipping through the woody stems with practiced ease, Catcher moved in a world of striped light and banded shadows. The tropical sun pressed ineffectually earthwards, filtered by the canopying rainforest into dapples mottling the detritus mouldering the jungle floor and turning the leafy woodland into a hothouse. Orchids bloomed on gargantuan tree trunks choked with creeping vines. This was a sweltering land of contrasts where giantism and dwarfism not only coexisted but overlapped. Elephants came in mini and jumbo-sized packages. Deer no bigger than terriers evaded wild dogs fiercer in pack mentality than wolves.
An immense squatting ape blocking his path impeded Catcher's progress. Coated from sagittal crest to ankles in unkempt orangey hair the hue and texture of an orang-utan's shaggy coat and smelling disgustingly like wet carpet, the giant's high crowned head was expressively gorilla-faced, wearing a look of distant curiosity. Barking warningly at Catcher, the inapproachable titan resumed ripping free a melon-like jackfruit from where it clustered on the parent trunk. Bashing open the forty pound green skinned husk against the ground with the ease of cracking an egg, he scooped out chunks of bulbous, yellow flesh and crammed them into his waiting mouth, savouring the banana flavoured treat. Predominantly a bamboo eater aping the giant panda on the Chinese mainland, the pot-bellied vegetarian found the huge tree-borne fruit a welcome supplement to an otherwise nutritionally bland diet.
Catcher made to go around the monster ape, giving it a suitably wide berth, when a snarl escaped his lips. Creeping at him from the side through the thick stalks slunk a rancorously eyed carnivore
The taste of cats to come, the bob-tailed feline prototyped the Sabretooth body plan familiar in Yowlar's day and birthplace. Leopard sized but camouflaged with a tiger's stripes to cunningly blend into the bamboo thickets, her elongated neck carried on from disproportionately long front legs down a sloping back ending in squat, muscular hindquarters. Hissing spitefully at the naked human having the cheek to growl at her, the she-cat laid her ears flat and showed off her medium-length canines to devastating effect. Mouth gaping wide, her natural stabbers—serrated like saw teeth—shimmered in the barred sunlight.
The woody shaft clutched in Catcher's hand seemed woefully inadequate pitted against a fanged cat and bullish ape. Sharpened into a razored stabbing point, the short bamboo spear was in fact deadlier than the handheld stone weaponry his migrating forebears transported out of Africa. Increasing the reach and thrusting power of the wielder, its inherent drawback was a lack of durability. Left untended, wooden tools quickly rotted away in this dank environment. But in a jungle where bamboo grew as profusely as weeds, replacement spears—alongside knives, needles, and a range of other imagined implements—could be cut and fashioned with ease. The scarcity of workable flint in this region forced the emigrant humans to adopt a comparable bamboo-based technology. Adaptation is the forte of the human species, and necessity the mother of all invention.
Haired with a mop of thick, black curls, Catcher was recognisably modern in looks and build. Adolescent in age, this maturing Java Man already stood tall at five and a half feet and, barring accidents or predation, would top out at six feet in height—twice the stature of his gracile ancestors. Possessing smaller teeth and the dwindling brow ridges destined to carry on through the Homo lineage before terminating in the thick-boned Neanderthals, in our eyes his anatomy was overpoweringly humanlike. Gone was the barrel-chested torso of his ape forebears. Perfectly bipedal, he was athletically built and sported the first truly human nose on a compressed face. Endowed with a bigger brain still only three-quarters the size of unsown descendants, he rationalised with greater intellectuality than any other hominin, although by modern standards his thought processes were rigid and sectioned, lacking the creative momentum that would one day see cave art flower and the first ritual burials performed.
But if Africa was the cradle of humankind, then Southeast Asia became its nursery. Catcher's direct ancestors poured out of the birth continent by way of North Africa, dispersing from the Sinai across India into southern and northern Asia, and on into parts of Europe in an astonishingly short time. Within a few hundred thousand years Man was colonising two continents, spreading inevitably across the globe in a generational exodus. Companion populations of Peking Man dwelt in China's bamboo forests, enacting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle mirroring that of their Javanese neighbours. Hominin ingenuity would in time extend to undertaking ocean crossings in perilously flimsy seacraft in order to people the Australian wilds with tribes of aboriginal humans. Virtually no corner of the planet would go uncharted by the exploratory super-primates.
But Catcher's concerns lay in the here and now. Beads of sweat cascading down his pale skin had less to do with the muggy heat and more with the fear trembling his skinny arms and legs. Absently wishing that he had not arrogantly gone off hunting without his older brothers Hunter and Stalker was a pointless waste of precious thought. Wanting only to emulate their prowess, and in doing so prove to his overprotective mother that he was no longer a boy confined to catching spiders or rooting out grubs, seemed the height of foolishness now. He would welcome her admonishment if he could get out of this stalemate alive and return to the riverside cave his tribe was housed in.
Curt animal noises impinged upon his already stressed nerves. There appeared to be a hissing and hooting contest between cat and ape. Catcher frowned at the incomprehensible exchange. Losing the ability to converse in the lingo of the wild creatures was a corollary of Man's snowballing smartness. In the course of human evolution, the advancing apes developed the physiology for improved verbalisation. Incapable of fully articulating all the sounds of modern human speech, Catcher's people communicated much like toddlers speak. Possessing a limited vocabulary based intrinsically on nouns, abstract thought conveyed by verbs and adjectives remained beyond them. But stringing together four or five word sentences dumbed down by a lack of syntax was a huge step up from bestial grunts and growls. The downside to pursuing spoken language was that Man no longer talked to the animals. At least not yet. In future times, humans would teach sign language to captive great apes in an effort to recapture that lost gift, seeking other earthly intelligences to converse with to assuage our intellectual aloneness.
Dropping into a crouch, grasping his spear tighter, Catcher read the tenseness in the body language of the unintelligible creatures.
'Touch the manling and I will beat you to a pulp,’ avowed the monstrous primate.
'Go back to feasting on tree dung and mind your own business, you big ape,’ the cat growled back, directing her calculating eyes on to the teenaged human. ‘No beast comes between a Sabretooth and her prey.'
'Guess I'll be the first.'
Catcher flinched and rose, poised to flee when ten feet of ape came imposingly up off his haunches and p
ounded his bodybuilder chest with the cupped palms of his huge hands. Three times more massive than a modern gorilla, he was the ultimate bouncer.
'What is the Upright to you?’ the cat snarled worryingly, her hesitancy to act clear from the way she awkwardly lifted a forepaw, unsure if she should proceed. The standing ape was uncomfortably reminiscent of an erect bear.
A brain steeped in simian memories measured the human boy through placid eyes. ‘Kinsman,’ hooted the Gigant. ‘He is kindred.'
Hissing at the disparate primates, the solitary cat slammed her paw down and spat, ‘Prides are so overrated,’ before turning tail and sauntering away. Perhaps it was time to strike Uprights from the Sabretooth menu.
Too confounded by the clawfoot's unexpected retreat to feel relief, Catcher pointed after the departing feline and uttered amazedly, 'Yuma nohn! Siorm yirta naj shuu. Siorm yirta kem shuu. Vati yabo. Vati elmar. ‘ ('Enemy home. Stop hunt man meat. Stop hunt I meat. You good. You friend.')
Impossible as the language barrier was to overcome, the Gigant comprehended from inferable gesture and tones the tinier primate's thanks. Responding with a sharp bark and accompanying head nod, the hulking silverback dropped to all fours and fist-walked off into the steamy greenery. The selective hand of evolution would eventually relegate this peaceable colossus to the fossil record only, but his descendants would live on. Adventuresome individuals crossing the land bridge periodically connecting the Eurasian landmass with the Americas would further evolve into truly gigantic walkers that the Paleo-Indians of the northwest would come to call Sasquatch, later being popularly named Bigfoot.
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