Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  Keerbrock appeared amused. Apparently, he was not used to his suggestions being countermanded. “As you wish,” he said, almost graciously.

  Claire led the way to a locked, windowless storage room. Opening the door, she turned on the lights. On a worktable in the center of the room were the cranium and the yam, as well as chunks of the sedimentary rock in which they had been embedded. The array was conspicuously absent, but represented by photos on a whiteboard behind the table that depicted objects as they appeared in the scans as well as how they looked after the surrounding rock had been picked away. Another had photos of the lip as it was in the badlands, complete with photos of the recumbent fold, which had brought the objects toward the surface, while a third board displayed some of Sergei’s work dating the various strata and objects.

  Keerbrock first went to the whiteboard showing the lip in its natural context, then the other two boards. Only after studying the photos and data did he turn to the objects on the table. Neither had spoken a word since they left Claire’s office. Keerbrock spent a good deal of time looking at the cranium. He then picked up a chunk of the sedimentary rock, felt its texture, and studied it closely. Next he peered at the jadeite and sighed. The stone was still encrusted with rock, but its shape was clear, as was the small patch of surface that looked smooth and polished. Claire clenched her fists. She knew what was coming.

  “You realize that this”—he pointed at the rock—“is radioactive?”

  “I think I know what you mean …”

  “It would have been far better had you never uncovered it.” Again Keerbrock shook his head. He sat down in a chair next to the worktable.

  Claire didn’t know what to say.

  He looked up and down the table, slowly tapping his fingers. “OK, we’ll get back to this. What’s your plan?”

  Claire took him through the suite of studies and papers she had sketched out, starting with a description of the find, its geological context, and dating techniques. It was a conservative approach that explored the possible origins of the bones, whether the cranium and the ulnae came from the same animal or species, what was the age of the creature or creatures at death, whether there was any evidence of disease or malnutrition, and, finally, how the bones fit in the taxonomy of the Elephas line. She then described other parallel tracks the team would pursue, trying to fit the elephants into a climatic and ecological context.

  Keerbrock slightly arched an eyebrow, as much a show of approval as he was ever likely to give. “So far so good, but there’s more, isn’t there?”

  This was the moment she dreaded. “Yes, there’s more.”

  “So I feared.”

  Claire drew a deep breath. “Yes, there’s another track. If, as we suspect, the features of the cranium point to an explosive growth in the frontal lobe—rather than random deformity—then we’d like to try to fit this into the biogeophysical template—the one that Potts and you pioneered that at times of rapid climate change, specialists tended to die out while generalists survived. What other animals underwent rapid evolutionary change at that time; what were the environmental stresses driving adaptation; what ability was that explosion of brain size enhancing or enabling?”

  “With just one cranium, you’d be constructing a pretty large building on a very small foundation …”

  “You know better than me that some grand evolutionary stories have been built on far less,” said Claire.

  “That’s right, you’ve got pictures of bones in an array—but not the bones themselves—and a rock that looks very much like the type of food that a smart animal would survive on—and subsequently worship—in a time of extreme dearth. I’ll bet that you even have a working hypothesis about the ecological drivers, yes?” He looked right at Claire. “Something about the need for communication and cooperation driving social complexity, producing a positive feedback, and an ecological surplus ability in the form of consciousness and a capacity for symbolic expression?”

  Claire was miserable. Keerbrock was heading down the path to the same cavalier dismissal he’d given ten years earlier.

  “And,” Keerbrock continued in a reasonable tone, “when you publish this hypothesis, I think you know what happens next—all the solid work you and your confederates have done on the noncognitive aspects of this find get buried under the avalanche of ridicule that will greet the announcement of five-and-a-half-million-year-old elephant Picassos.”

  Keerbrock stood up. “I know why you contacted me—your find might be the missing piece I talked about in years past. But one reason I gave up that chase was that finding it was one thing; proving it an impossible problem.”

  Keerbrock got up to leave. Claire took a couple of deep breaths. “Ten years ago you were right.” Keerbrock stopped but didn’t turn around. “But now you’re wrong.”

  Keerbrock slowly turned. “I’m wrong?”

  Claire met his gaze. “Yes, you’re wrong. You’re wrong because the world has had four decades to see that the scientific method fails when it comes to things like consciousness, and you’re wrong because people like me have learned from past mistakes. We’ve learned how to frame the issue in terms of drivers and noncognitive abilities rather than getting mired in improvable assertions and unanswerable questions.”

  Keerbrock came back and stood by the worktable. “Say that last part again—and, by the way, I don’t accept that first part.”

  “I’m saying that I recognize the limitations of the empirical method for dealing with matters of the mind. I don’t need to jump to the obvious conclusion; all I need to do is lay out a plausible scenario for the dramatic physical changes in the size and, so far as it can be inferred, the structure of the brain, and what functions—stress functions—these changes enabled.” She took a breath. “It’s going to take some time even to get to that point. I can leave questions of culture and cognition for later—though I’ll tell you straight out: that’s why I’m doing this!”

  Pointing to the jadeite stone, Keerbrock asked mildly, “And what about this?”

  Claire ran out of steam. “I don’t know. When the scans showed it in the rock, I gave it to Katie Segal, one of the graduate students, to study …” Claire’s eyes widened as she realized what she had done.

  There was a silence. Keerbrock shook his head sadly. “So let’s frame the situation: you’re starting several hard-science parallel tracks that will involve several different teams of scientists, and you’ve outsourced the most delicate thing of all—the part that you’ve got to be scrupulously careful to avoid overinterpreting, which would undermine the credibility of everything else; in other words you have given the part that could blow the whole thing up—to an untested graduate student?”

  “I trust Katie,” Claire offered lamely, wondering to herself what Katie might do. She owed Katie her sanity, and the young woman had been extraordinary after Hayden’s death. But she had brought Katie on board in part because she was a rebel. Now that rebellious streak could undo everything. Still, she had to trust her. “Katie took a big leap when she abandoned the dig to come with me. I can’t toss her aside. And besides, I’ll be vetting any submissions for publication.”

  “No doubt, but it’s not the scientific journals I’m worried about.”

  Claire knew exactly what he meant, and she thought of Constantine at the New York Times and the slew of emails he had sent her that she had yet to answer. She couldn’t put him off much longer, and he was smart enough to start contacting the rest of her team if she continued to stonewall him.

  Claire saw her chances to enlist Keerbrock’s involvement slipping away. She had no idea what to say at this point, but she had to make her pitch. The scientist, seeing that Claire was about to speak, held up a finger.

  “Before you ask something to which you won’t like my answer, let me say a couple of things. What you’ve found could turn out to be very important. Or—by now you know what the ‘or’ is … Let’s keep in touch, and let’s see how things go …” Once again, he s
tarted to leave and then stopped. “Oh, and I don’t need to tell you this, but I’d keep things very close to the vest until you’re ready to publish.”

  “Let’s keep in touch” was a far cry from what she’d hoped Keerbrock’s response would be. But she noticed that in leaving he had left the door open. She thought about that. It was true; he had left the door open. And he wouldn’t have cautioned her about keeping things quiet unless he thought what she was doing was worth protecting.

  55

  It was a day for telephone calls. Friedl rang not long after Keerbrock had departed to ask how it went. Claire didn’t want the department chair to get nervous or, worse, smell blood, so she decided a low-key response might be best, as though Nobel Prize winners dropped in on a regular basis. “It was fine. He had some useful suggestions. We’re going to keep in touch.” That should buy her some time. “I’m very happy.” This last sentence was about as far from the truth as was possible.

  After she got off the phone, she thought about Keerbrock’s warning about word getting out. In Kazakhstan, she hadn’t really worried about the press or the blogosphere. But since she had returned, a couple of reporters had contacted her and some of her team about the events in Kazakhstan, but, fortunately, they had focused on the upheaval. Kazakhstan barely registered with the self-absorbed American public.

  Back home, the stakes were much higher, and she realized that word already was out—Constantine had warned her about Gwynne, after all. Who knew what he was saying? And while she had warned her team about casually discussing the find, who knew whether they took her seriously? She didn’t worry about Katie or Francisco, but Benoit was a proven quantity when it came to treachery, and then there were Waylon, Tony, Abigail, not to mention Samantha who knew juicy stuff about the find and had no stake whatsoever in keeping it to herself.

  Claire had told Katie, Francisco, and Benoit to take some much needed R&R once they got to Germany (via Dubai), and the team had scattered. Now, she knew she needed them back at work, and she sent out emails asking them to get in contact ASAP and reminding them not to discuss the find. She sent a separate email to Sergei and the two Kazakhs helping at Transteppe laying out what she had in mind.

  Even before Keerbrock’s visit, Claire had formulated a plan for rolling out the discovery. She’d hoped to have Keerbrock’s imprimatur on it, but now she was going to have to go ahead without it. And she had a good plan, though it only worked so long as the world was populated with honorable people who played by the rules.

  Her train of thought was interrupted when her phone rang again. Her heart leaped when she saw it was Transteppe.

  “Sergei?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Thank God! Is everything OK?”

  Sergei laughed. “Sure, we now have a karaoke hour at five every night. You should hear Rob’s version of ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”

  “Seriously!”

  Sergei dropped the bantering tone. “Seriously, I miss you, and, by the way, I can’t remember the last time I said those words to anyone—in any language.”

  “Oh, Sergei …” Claire said wistfully. “Wish you were here.”

  “As do I.”

  This reminded her that Sergei had other, so far unnamed, problems besides the uprising. “About your situation—”

  Sergei cut her off smoothly. “Don’t worry, I’m a very good juggler,” he said and quickly ended the call.

  She barely had time to reflect on Sergei’s call when her cell phone rang again. She looked to see who it was, but the ID was unavailable.She debated a second before answering. “Hello?”

  It was Constantine. “Hi, Claire,” he said cheerily.

  “Hi, Adam,” she said, wondering where he had gotten her cell number, and whether his pride would let him complain about her unresponsiveness.

  “Heard you had a hairy escape from Kazakhstan.”

  “No big deal. Could have been far worse.”

  “Glad to hear that.” Constantine paused, apparently done with the small talk. “Are you near your computer?”

  Uh-oh. “Should I be?”

  She could hear a chuckle. “Old Bones, the paleontological gossip site, just put out a tweet about your ancient elephant bones saying that they fell off a truck.”

  “Fuck’s sake!” A few clicks and there it was, full frontal snark:

  Word is that there is no “there” there regarding the “discovery” of a five-million-year-old elephant culture. So clumsy, those Silk Road camel jockeys! Madame Blavatsky on hold on Line 1.

  “Thanks for the good news, Adam.”

  “Just sayin’,” he said, keeping up the breezy tone, “it might be good to get your story out before someone else—for instance the slime bucket who fed the item to Old Bones—takes over the narrative.”

  Claire wondered for an instant whether Constantine had fed the story to Old Bones, but she quickly put the thought out of her head. He was persistent but not slimy. She made an instant decision. “OK, Adam, here’s how we’re proceeding: we’re submitting something soon for fast-track scientific publication. You’ll be my first call once we know it’ll be published.”

  “Thank you, Claire, that’s very kind, but how about letting me in the tent under embargo so I can be ready to go?”

  Claire thought about this. Even if she trusted Constantine, what about his editors? What if another blog put something out? The Times could say that the embargo had been broken … “Sorry, Adam, but I do mean it about being my first call.”

  There was a silence on the other end for a few seconds. “OK, how about an exclusive?”

  Claire felt a frisson of panic. These were dangerous waters, as she had no idea how these things worked.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the Times will commit to prominently featured coverage of your find in return for exclusive access up until publication, which will occur immediately after your work is published in a leading—meaning peer-reviewed—scientific journal.”

  Claire didn’t know the ins and outs of the newspaper business, but common sense told her that Constantine would not have made that offer without prior approval from his editors.

  “Can I get that in writing?”

  “Sure, so long as we’re clear: no peer-reviewed publication, no article.”

  “Sure, if there’s no publication, I’ve got other problems …”

  “And no leaks from your team to other publications—that’s another deal breaker.”

  Claire thought about Keerbrock’s warning, and about Benoit, the only one she was really worried about.

  “Again, if this gets out before journal publication, I’ve got bigger problems.” She thought a bit. “We can start talking after the letter is accepted—that’ll give you a couple of weeks.”

  “Not now?”

  “Sorry, we need to focus without any distractions.”

  56

  Francisco looked again at the three-dimensional models slowly rotating on two computer screens in his temporary office in a drab administration building at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. With Benoit’s help (an important positive on the Benoit ledger, which had heretofore been laden with nothing but negative checkmarks), he had secured visiting scholar status at the Smithsonian. Claire had insisted that Francisco’s real work be kept under wraps until they were ready to publish, and so Benoit had described his project as computer modeling of the evolutionary history of the elephant brain. To further insulate Francisco from other scientists, he’d been installed in the administration building rather than the sleek new glass-walled genetics lab the zoo had recently built.

  Though naturally sociable, Francisco understood the need for secrecy, and he was happy to listen to Rhonda, the sunny middle-aged lifer zoo administrator in the adjoining office, talk about her babysitter problems. During work hours he kept to himself. He’d bought a trail bike and would take long, sweltering rides through Rock Creek Park during lunch hours and after work. After months in Kazakhstan, he sim
ply loved Washington’s buffet of restaurants and bars. He’d taken the phone numbers of several young women but hadn’t yet followed up.

  Mostly, he worked, taking advantage of the Smithsonian’s vast database on mammalian anatomy. After fine-tuning the quick and dirty computer model of the likely shape of Bart’s brain that he had done at Transteppe, Francisco had continued to work on the comparison with the brains of modern African elephants.

  One distinctive aspect of the modern elephant brain is that there are a huge number of neurons in the cerebellum in relation to the cerebral cortex, which is where most thinking takes place. This disproportion—ten times the ratio in other mammals—had led to a lot of speculation about what these neurons were doing. The consensus was that the explosive growth had something to do with sound processing. Elephants used extremely low-frequency vocalizations for long-distance communication, and their reliance on sound might have spurred the growth of neurons to process the information. There was similar growth in the cerebellum of toothed whales and bats, animals that relied on extremely sophisticated echolocation abilities.

  The other candidate to spur such growth were the demands entailed in controlling the elephant trunk’s one hundred fifty thousand muscles, which give the elephant the ability to both pick up a paintbrush and pull down a tree. The need to process the extraordinary amount of sensory and motor information involved in the animal’s trunk could alone explain the huge number of cerebellar neurons.

  The demands of the trunk and vocalization might also explain why the elephant had a disproportionate ratio of cerebellar neurons to cerebral cortex neurons. In physical terms, a brain is an expensive piece of equipment, at least for land animals that have to deal with gravity. The more a brain grows in size, the more blood is diverted from the muscles—there’s a trade-off between brains and brawn—and also, the bigger the brain, the better the diet required to supply its energy. And in this expensive piece of equipment, perhaps the most expensive part is the cerebral cortex, where we think and make purposeful decisions. So, an animal doesn’t have more brainpower than it needs, and particularly an animal doesn’t have more cerebral cortex than it needs. And that seems to be the case for modern African elephants.