Antediluvian
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Art Among the Hominins? In England, a 500,000-year-old H. erectus hand axe has been found with a symmetrically placed fossil seashell in its handgrip area. Apparently, the fossil (pre-existing in the flint), had ornamental value, or some other value, and so the axe was made by carefully knapping away the stone around it. I’ve taken some artistic liberties by placing a similar axe in Morocco (and then Spain) at least 500,000 years earlier, but given the very slow pace of technological change at the time, this isn’t much of a stretch. Other hand axes with less spectacular fossil inclusions have been found at other sites, as well as axes made from banded jasper, and some that appear to have hand-carved decorations as well. Thus, Ba’s axe, while not typical, is well within the range of ornamented tools H. erectus are known to have made.
Ocean Travel: It’s now widely accepted that the Indonesian island of Flores was colonized by H. erectus about 800,000 years ago, and that the only way to get there was by boat, with some sea crossings up to 100 kilometers along the way. (These people subsequently evolved into “hobbits,” but that’s another story entirely.) The evidence for sea travel in the Mediterranean around the same time is less ironclad, but in any case by 1.4 million years ago H. erectus groups were living in both Spain and Morocco (probably only about 10 kilometers apart at the time), and were anatomically just as smart as the Flores adventurers. So, yeah, that crossing would have been well within their ability. Modern swimmers can cross the modern beach-to-beach gap of 16 km in about four and a half hours, so for Ba to push a raft 60 percent of that distance in roughly 180 percent of the time seems not unreasonable.
Is it possible to cross the ocean without complex language? I don’t see why not; a basic raft isn’t a whole lot more complicated than a bird’s nest. It does, however, imply that H. erectus knew how to how to chop logs into a uniform size and lash them securely together. Alternatively, a “coracle” is a type of one-man fishing boat found all around the world, that consists of a large, round basket covered in some combination of cloth, animal hides, resin, and pitch. I suspect large leaves could be used as well, especially if they’re from a naturally gummy or sappy species of tree. This might be simpler to build than a raft, as it might not even require the invention of knots or twine. However, it would be a lot more treacherous for ocean crossings; since a coracle is somewhat tippy. It’s also not naturally buoyant, so its ability to float is only as good as the maker’s ability to keep it from leaking, and the pilot’s ability to bail. A coracle would also not be capable of holding more than one or two people at a time—hardly enough to form a colony or a trading expedition.
To me, one of the most interesting moments in all of prehistory is the first time anyone decided to cross an ocean on a boat. It seems quite likely that this was an H. erectus fisherman staring across the Strait of Gibraltar. I suppose it could have been a fisherwoman, but in all human cultures, dangerous stunts tend to be testosterone driven.
Notes on the Framing Story
The spread of Y-chromosome haplogroups is the subject of considerable study, and Harv’s chromosome—from the D-M174 haplogroup—would certainly be anomalous in a white European. D-M174 dominates only in three small populations: the Tibetans, the brown-skinned Andamanese of the Indian Ocean, and the fair-skinned Ainu or Jomon people of Japan and Siberia (who, interestingly, have drowned Antediluvian sites of their own). However, D-M174 is present in India, and has been found at low frequency throughout central Asia, and in populations native to Eastern Europe. If there is an adventurer’s chromosome that connects all the dots in this book, this is surely it.
The quantum computing jargon here is mostly accurate, although the idea of the Y chromosome as a quantum computer or quantum storage device is an unsupported literary invention. Sorry.
In all four of these “time travel” stories, what fascinates me is that these events, or something like them, must actually have happened. The plot and character details may be made up, but the evidence—genetic, linguistic, cultural and archaeological—point to these turning points as real moments in our collective history. Ice Age peoples really did build vast, megalithic settlements, and then the Ice Age really did end, flooding millions of square kilometers of inhabited territory. Cro-Magnon and Neandertal humans really did coexist and interbreed in Europe, and these interactions surely must, at times, have resembled our handed-down fairy tales. A spontaneous mutation of the FOXP2 neural development gene—the so-called “language gene”—really did occur and rapidly diffuse throughout the Homo sapiens population, turning clever hominins into a society of bards and teachers, historians and worrywarts.
Can meaningful stories be handed down, garbled but largely intact, for tens of thousands of years? The Rig Veda’s descriptions of the extinct Saraswati River suggest that clear details can be retained for at least six thousand years, while some Aboriginal oral traditions accurately describe geological events and features from at least ten thousand years ago. The whole existence of complex language appears to cover a span only five to six times that long, and by definition there can be no oral traditions older than that. So is it really so crazy to imagine our oldest legends retain some authentic detail? If so, then we should lend a measure of actual scientific credence to everything from Scandinavian trolls to the Aboriginal Dreamtime to the Garden of Eden itself. Perhaps reconstructing the literal past is merely an exercise in matching ancient legends to provable scientific facts. The more I thought about these times and places and people, the more inevitable these stories felt to me, and it pleases me greatly to share them with you here.