Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"Yes, a Neanderthal abri just north of here, probably no more than a quarter-of-a-mile from the one we were working in today. The institute ran a summer dig there for a few seasons in the early nineties. The habitation level was carbon-dated at around 35,000 years B.P."

"B.P.?"

"Sorry, before the present."

Joly poured them all a little more of the local white wine, a fruity Montravel. "I see. And what of this hoax, this argument?"

"Well, first you have to understand-as Julie pointed out yesterday-that anthropologists love to argue-"

"Is that so?" Joly murmured.

"-and nowhere is that more true than in Neanderthal research." He leaned back out of the way as the waiter laid the gleaming arsenal of utensils for the next course. "Right from the beginning-and the original Neanderthal Man was found in 1856-there's been a continuing, usually noisy fight over where to put him."

Joly showed his surprise; one of his eyebrows went up a millimeter. "Where to put him? He's not in a museum?"

"What I meant," Gideon said, laughing, "was where to put him taxonomically."

The issue, he explained, was the place of the Neanderthals in the long progression of human evolution. Were these muscular, beetle-browed creatures our ancestors-that is, the ancestors of modern Europeans-or were they evolutionary dead ends, crowded off the branches of the human tree like so many withered fruits, when our true ancestors, the Cro Magnons, arrived in Europe from Africa, bringing with them the technological marvels and cultural advances of the Upper Paleolithic age? Was Neanderthal Man the shambling, grunting, bent-kneed brute of the comics, dragging his woman along by the hair, or was he a sensitive being with language, culture, and an appreciation of beauty and art? Were the Neanderthals, in fact, human beings at all, or did they belong somewhere lower in the evolutionary scale, down with the monkeys and the apes?

"I see," Joly said. "And what is the position of the Institut de Prehistoire on these questions?"

"They don't have a position. They're divided just like every one else. Half of them are staunch defenders of the Neanderthals as card-carrying Homo sapiens, and the other half think they should be frog-marched out of the human line altogether, right into the trash pile with Gigantopithecus, Australopithecus boisei and all the other evolutionary wriggles that didn't go anywhere." That, at least, had been the way they'd all felt back then, and knowing them Gideon couldn't imagine they'd changed their views very much.

Julie took over at that point, explaining to Joly, with considerable zest, about the finding of the four perforated bones and their subsequent exposure as a fraud. By the time she finished the magret de canard had been brought, demolished and removed; likewise the salade verte, and the three of them were doing their seriously diminished best with the cheese course.

After a long, meditative lull in the conversation, Joly, first asking Julie's permission, lit his first Gitane of the evening. "And this is so very important?" he finally said as smoke swirled from his mouth and nostrils. "The making of a necklace?"

Gideon washed down a sliver of cheese-Gerome, according to Joly with a sip from his wineglass, now filled with a dry red Bergerac. "You better believe it. To put it simply, the making of decorative objects is one of the things that makes us unique, a convenient dividing line between human beings and everything else that's ever lived. Apes don't do it, monkeys don't do it, Homo erectus didn't do it; only Homo sapiens does it. So if you can establish that the Neanderthals did too, that pretty much means you have to classify them as one of us; not Homo neanderthalensis, a separate species of their own, but Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a fully human subspecies, a kind of race."

"I see," Joly said. "Then I assume these bones caused a considerable uproar among those interested in such things?"

"Are you kidding? Once the news got out, it split the whole world of Middle and Upper Paleolithic anthropologists-"

"All eleven of them," Julie said, then quickly held up her hands: "I apologize, I couldn't help myself."

"-into two warring camps. The institute staff themselves were split right down the middle. Some people flat-out refused to believe it, some even came pretty close to calling Ely Carpenter a faker, but his defenders were just as adamant, and the Old Man of Tayac- le Vieux de Tayac -carried the day."

"Carpenter," Joly said, tipping his head back to expel a lungful of smoke. "Not 'Carpentier'? He wasn't a Frenchman?"

"No, he was an American, but he'd lived in France for a long time, a decade or more."

"And he himself was the perpetrator?" Joly asked.

"Nobody knows," Gideon said. "He denied it, of course, but he came in for a lot of abuse and ridicule. So did the institute, even though they didn't really have any part in it. Even today some people think Carpenter was responsible, some people think he was duped. Either way, he was thoroughly disgraced."

"Which do you think he was," Julie asked, "duper or dupee? You haven't said."

"I think he was duped. Sure, he might have wanted something like this to be true, but from what I know about him he wasn't the kind of guy to try to falsify the archaeological record. Besides, it was such a primitive kind of fake; someone with Carpenter's credentials would've been able to pull off something a lot more sophisticated, a lot harder to detect."

"How was it done?" Joly asked.

"The holes in the bones were made with an electric drill bit-which, I should point out, was not found in your standard Middle Paleolithic tool kit-and then stained with something so that they didn't look freshly made. That was it." Somebody like Carpenter would have known it was only a question of time before someone saw through it."

"And afterwards," Joly asked, "what happened to him?"

"Oh, about what you'd expect. His reputation was in shreds of course, and from what I understand he got a little paranoid about it; kind of wacky. In the end, he had to resign, of course."

"And now where is he?"

"No place he can be reached, I'm afraid. He was an amateur pilot, he had his own plane, and he crashed it not too long afterwards; up in Brittany."

Joly glazed at the beamed ceiling for a while, smoking placidly. "If he was so good a scientist," he said, watching the blue-gray tendrils spiral slowly up to be torn apart in the breeze, "and if the hoax was so primitive, how was it that he was taken in?"

"That's the question, all right. It's one of the things I'll be tackling in the book."

"And who did the taking in?" Julie added.

Gideon nodded. "Yup, that's also the question. A man named Jacques Beaupierre's the director now and he's given me his blessing to talk to the whole staff and ask them anything I want. I'm hoping I can come up with some answers."

"I would also be interested to know-"Joly began.

"Lucien, let me ask you something. What's with all this interest in the Old Man of Tayac? You don't think-or do you think-there's some connection between the institute and Mr. X back there in the cave?"

Joly plucked a shred of tobacco from his lips and leaned back in his chair. "Let me show you something." From the inside pocket of his suit jacket he took an unsealed white envelope. Inside were three black-and-white photographs of the same object that he laid out side by side on the tablecloth. He waited for their response.

"A rusty trowel," Julie said after a moment.

"Lying on the ground," said Gideon.

"Keenly observed," said Joly. "It was found by one of my officers in the brush about twenty-five meters from the entrance to the abri in which we were this afternoon. Now look at this one, the enlargement. What do you see burned into the handle?"