Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  Claire pulled it out of the satchel and walked to her desk. As she walked, a wave of nausea hit her and she felt faint. She grabbed for a chair, which promptly rolled away, and as she lurched to regain her balance, she stumbled and dropped the salt crystal rock.

  The crystal shattered on the hard floor. Half of it was reduced to shards, but half the crystal remained intact. Claire sighed with a grim smile. For the second time, she had dropped an object collected in Kazakhstan, though in this case, she felt no pangs of guilt. She’d only picked up the large salt crystal because of its unusual shape.

  She looked down at the scatter on the floor. In the center of the intact half was a dark-tan object. Claire picked it up. She recognized instantly that she was looking at part of an array of elephant molars. She looked more closely, her mind racing, and then she gasped.

  Claire donned surgical gloves and picked up the intact crystal. Forgetting her nausea, she quickly went to the clean room in the lab, where she found a sterilized container. She gently placed the crystal in the container and then placed the container in a freezer that she had acquired in case they needed to preserve biological specimens. It was empty, and now she vowed to ensure that it remained empty save for that container.

  She smiled with satisfaction and reached for the phone. She was going to enjoy giving Keerbrock a dose of his own medicine.

  With luck, he picked up the phone.

  “It’s Claire.”

  “Ah, Claire. Are you a mom?”

  “Will, I’m not a hippo—though I’m about the same size—I’m human. With humans it takes nine months.”

  Keerbrock chuckled. “So, news then.”

  “Yep, news. “Claire paused for effect. “Will, if you were going to look for really ancient DNA, what might preserve it best?”

  Claire heard a sharp intake of breath.

  “Are you saying …”

  “C’mon Will, you’ve played this game with me many times.”

  “Claire, you know as well as I do that you can’t get DNA from petrified material.”

  “Who said anything about petrified material, Will?”

  She heard another sharp intake of breath. “Just answer the question,” Claire said lightly.

  “OK, hydroxyapatite, a calcium compound in bones and teeth. Also, aridity and crystal salt would help.”

  “So if we found a tooth preserved in salt crystal that came from one of the most arid places on earth, that would be a good candidate?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Hmm, five million years, odds are very long, but there’s a chance.” He paused again. “Assuming the tooth was encapsuled at the height of the salinity crisis, when it was broiling hot and dry as a pizza oven, lowers the odds a bit more. Yes, there’s a chance. What are you thinking?”

  Claire’s eyes moistened. “I’m thinking that I’d very much like to meet Bart in person.”

  author’s note

  Although the ancient elephant species in Deep Past is fictional, the idea that over the great sweep of geologic time another species with great intelligence might have come and gone without leaving a trace is within the realm of the possible—given our understanding of how evolution works. In constructing the story of Bart and his confreres, I’ve tried to hew to the scientifically possible.

  The selective pressures that produced human intelligence had nothing to do with preparing Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; they had a lot to do with favoring those of our ancestors adaptable enough to survive in a fast-changing landscape. One assumption underlying the story of Deep Past is the connection between past, natural climate upheavals and the evolution of human intelligence, and this is a subject that has been actively investigated as the data on past climates has become more precise.

  For instance, using data on past climates collected by Peter de Menocal, a paleoclimatologist, and Richard Potts, a paleoanthropologist who heads the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, has shown that during periods of climate upheaval over the past few million years, our more specialized forbears died out, while the more adaptable generalists (read: smarter) survived—a process that saw Australopithecus boisei fade, while Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster began to flourish some 2.5 million years ago. High climate variability returned about 1.65 million and 1.55 million years ago, coincident with the ascendance of Homo erectus, who in turn gave way to the even more generalized Homo sapiens.

  Even as climate change (natural in this case) was creating a smarter human, it was favoring more generalized animals of other species. In Africa, for instance, more primitive forms of elephant, baboon, and hippo among other creatures disappeared during various ancient climate upheavals. Of course, while some of these animals became more adaptively flexible, we became really smart, suggesting that, at least in our case, other factors besides climate were at work.

  One thing that seems to have happened is that at some point our expanding intelligence became self-reinforcing. Many have pointed out that expanding brain power comes at the expense of diverting blood from the muscles to the brain. As this happened, our ancestors had to organize for hunting to feed this ever more demanding brain of ours. Cooperative hunting and the complex pressures of maintaining order in large groups favored the more intelligent as well so that the smarter we got, the smarter we needed to be.

  Could this have happened in other species? Why not? If so, however, why aren’t such species still here? Christopher Langton, a pioneer in the study of artificial life at the Santa Fe Institute has an answer to that. As he describes it, in any system when a group of players face new ecological opportunities, various competing organisms try different strategies to exploit the system. I described what happens next in my book The Future in Plain Sight, “Over time, this chaos resolves itself into a stable system as the competing groups sort things out. This persists until someone comes along with a special advantage, or something changes the ecology of the system. The favored competitor prospers, driving out rivals, until the whole system becomes unstable and crashes …” The point is that there’s such a thing about being too adaptable. Even the most brilliant adaptation can ultimately hustle one off the evolutionary stage.

  Apart from raising uncomfortable questions about where our species might fit into this cycle right now, Langton’s framework situates our rise to the top into a cycle that has been repeated many times over the eons. Other species have used other strategies to get to be top dog over the great sweep of time, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that in the past another occupant of that top spot got there through their wits. The difference in Deep Past of course, is that it wasn’t the elephants who pushed things too far and destabilized the system, but rather a climate cataclysm the likes of which the world hasn’t seen for many millions of years (the Messinian salinity crisis described in the book was a real event). It wasn’t Bart’s fault that he and his ilk died out. It will be ours, though, if we follow suit. Current climate change is a self-inflicted wound.

  In order to speed up the evolutionary process which led to Bart, I isolated his elephant forbears on an island, albeit an island that was surrounded by unpassable terrain rather than water. All the references to the magic of the “Island Rule” and island biogeography in the book are taken from real examples.

  Similarly, Claire’s background in studies of animal intelligence flows from my own investigations of the field over four decades.

  And, while the jadeite and its ability to summon anciently imbued images from the deep past is entirely a product of my imagination, the use of sound waves to construct images is as familiar as a sonogram. The field and wave properties of minerals have long been subjects of investigation in mainstream physics, and the question of whether higher mental abilities can be explained by the actions of quantum mechanics is the subject of active debate in the field. On the receiving end, many scientists have studied the elephant’s extremely sophisticated abilities to interpret sound waves.

  What I�
�ve tried to do in this book is imagine how another intelligence might evolve using a working hypothesis that over time natural selection favors those creatures optimized for the context of their times. Thus, utterly different creatures like the pangolin and the anteater might converge in shape as natural selection subtly conditions these animals to dig out and eat social insects. I suspect something similar might happen in the realm of higher mental abilities, even if those abilities have different roots. Our intelligence involves the integration and exploitation of a number of different senses and abilities—visual processing, sound generation, manual dexterity, among others—that developed for different reasons, while the demands of the harsh and changing environment in which my imagined ancient elephants lived placed a premium on the further and rapid development of their already sophisticated abilities to process sound. Where our and their abilities converge lies in the ability to symbolically represent the features and laws of the world around them and manipulate that world to their advantage.

  I took some liberties, of course. One of them was to imagine the lighter impact on the planet of an intelligent vegetarian animal that fed its large brain by foraging rather than hunting—an animal that used its intelligence to survive for a long time against the harshest climate imaginable, while still leaving almost no trace. Were it only so …

  acknowledgments

  The idea for this novel grew out of a simple thought: if the human race had died out 15,000 years ago, a million or so years from now, no successor intelligent species would have any evidence that a prior intelligent species had ever walked the planet. This insight led to a thought experiment in which I tried to imagine what kind of creature might have followed an analogous evolutionary arc, an effort that drew upon my prior investigations into the evolution of language and intelligence, animal behavior, and climate change, and my travels to research stations in remote lands.

  At least in this sense I owe a debt to every researcher I’ve talked to since I began my career. Claire embodies the resourcefulness, imagination, bravery, and stubbornness (a necessary attribute given the headwinds these scientists face) that seem to be commonly shared characteristics of the female field scientists I’ve had the good fortune of encountering over the years in the far corners of the planet.

  Working this material into a compelling story posed its own set of challenges, and I owe a great debt to Phyllis Grann, who took an early interest in this novel, and offered moral support and pithy suggestions during several revisions as I tried to hew to the science as well as honor the demands of creating characters and telling a story. I also benefitted from suggestions made by friends who read the manuscript at various stages. These include Mary Rasenberger, Bill Adams, Karen Lotz, Tully Friedman, and Tom Kehler. Tom also offered valuable insights into the arcana of the physics of waves.

  And thanks also to Diana Wege, who read the book and then drew the illustrations that helped bring to life the imagined and real in the book.

  Lastly, a big thanks to Arthur Klebanoff. It’s a great feeling when a writer finds a publisher who both gets what you are trying to do and also knows how to bring your work to an audience likely to appreciate the story. My thanks extends to his team of Brian Skulnik and Michelle Weyenberg, who shepherded the book through the publishing process and the editorial work of Traci Post and Sara Brady, as well as SallyAnne and Jacqui at McCartin/Daniels who managed the publicity outreach.