Aaron Elkins: Uneasy Relations

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 and 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 naive, 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.