Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"Uh-huh. You're looking at what was the most crowded place in Europe thirty-five thousand years ago, a real population center. The Cro-Magnons had just arrived, and the Neanderthals hadn't quite died out yet, or evolved, or whatever happened to them. Every one of those hollows-the ones you could reach, anyway-probably had a few tenants at one time or another. The Old Man of Tayac came from one just like that long, low one at the foot of that double-cleft."

Julie, still a little sleepy, watched it go by. "You know, you've only talked about the Tayac hoax in snippets now and then. I wouldn't mind having a better idea of what it was all about."

"Sure, what do you want to know?"

"Well, I know you know the people who were involved, the people from that institute-"

"The Institute of Prehistory… L'Institut de Prehistoire."

"-but you weren't actually here at the time it happened, were you?"

"No, a little before, unfortunately. I missed it by a couple of months. And the reason I knew them was that I was putting in a few weeks weeks on that middle-Neanderthal dig up the road near Le Moustier. It didn't have anything to do with the institute, but I was staying right there in Les Eyzies-at the Hotel Cro-Magnon, in fact-and of course anthropologists like to talk to other anthropologists Julie smiled. "To argue, you mean."

"That too," Gideon said equably. "Anyway, I made a courtesy call when I arrived and eventually I got to know them fairly well. But I was long gone by the time the ruckus over the Old Man started, and pretty much out of touch. I followed it in the journals, like everyone else."

"And what was that about, exactly-the ruckus?"

"Julie, are you sure I never told you about it?"

"Well, you might have. It's possible my mind wandered-kind of like yours does sometimes when I tell you about the National Park five-year plan. But now I'm here; it seems more relevant."

"Fair enough," he said, laughing. "Okay, it all goes back almost ten years, to when the institute first dug this Neanderthal site-the Tayac site. They found two burials, a mature adult male and a child of about three, along with a few stone tools, and that was it. The dig was wrapped up six or seven years ago and closed down. The burials and most of the stone tools and things are in the Museum of Man in Paris."

"And the mature adult, that was the Old Man of Tayac?"

"In person."

"And what was so special about him?"

"About him, per se? Nothing; just one more Neanderthal old geezer-arthritic, toothless, bent over with age-probably all of thirty-five years old. An authentic, fairly typical burial. It was what was dug up later on that made him special."

"Later on? But you said the dig was closed."

"Yes, but you see, the director of the institute, Ely Carpenter, was convinced-obsessed is more like it-that there was more to be found in the abri, and even though there wasn't any more funding to keep the dig going, he kept at it on his own, poking around the cave in his spare time, and damned if he didn't eventually hit the jackpot." He looked up. "Here comes the coffee-cart. Interested?"

"Desperately."

As usual on European trains the coffee came in a flimsy plastic double-cup with a packet of grounds in the upper part, over which the vendor poured hot water; a gimcrack affair, to put it mildly. But also as usual, it was delicious: deeply aromatic, hearty, and soul-satisfying, especially to a couple of coffee-lovers whose biological clocks were under the unhappy impression that it was four o'clock in the morning. For a minute they paused in the narrative and sipped, letting the rich stuff flow like heated wine through their systems.

"Where was I?" Gideon asked after he'd downed half of it.

"Umm… 'hit the jackpot.'"

"Right. On second thought, make that 'won the booby prize.' What Ely came up with, you see, was this small cache of grave goods that were part of the old man's burial but had apparently been overlooked during the official excavation."

"Overlooked?" said Julie, surprised. "Sounds a little careless."

"Well, some of the ceiling had collapsed at least once during the last 35,000 years or so, you see, and it'd confused the strata quite a bit, so I guess it was excusable. Anyway, it was what Ely found in the cache that was so important."

"Which was?"

"Four small, brownish bones about an inch long; metapodials-foot bones, tarsal bones-from a prehistoric cave lynx. And what made them unique… " Gideon, no mean storyteller, paused for a couple of beats for the desired dramatic effect. "… was that three of them had oval holes cleanly drilled through one end. The fourth was perforated partway through."

Julie frowned at him over the rim of her cup. "So?"

"So they constituted, or seemed to constitute at the time, the very first concrete evidence that Neanderthals were advanced enough to produce any kind of art. You see, those bones were surely part of a necklace or bracelet that would have been strung together and worn. Plenty of things like that have shown up at Cro-Magnon sites, sure, but this was the first time they'd found any in a Neanderthal setting-in fact, they were the first Neanderthal decorative objects of any kind, or at least the first ones that weren't ambiguous."

Julie thought for a moment. "I can see why that would be important, but how could anyone say for sure that the Neanderthals made them? You said the Cro-Magnons were here at the same time. So who's to say that they didn't make them? How do you know that this Old Man didn't steal them, or find them, or trade for them, or-"

"Ah, that's the part that was so slick, Julie. It was that fourth bone, the one that was only partway drilled through. The fact that one of them was unfinished was proof-well, as close as you can come to proof in this kind of thing-that it was in the act of being made right there, on the spot. The natural assumption was that the Old Man of Tayac was a craftsman, and that he was buried with the products of his labor-maybe accidentally, maybe not."

"Ah, I see," she said, sitting back and gazing out the countryside again. "Yes, that was clever." She finished her coffee and put the cup on the tiny folding table below the window. "How did they find out it was a hoax?"

"It was an anonymous letter. It showed up at a Paris newspaperParis-Match, I think it was-about a month later, claiming that those four bones had been taken from some dusty little paleontology museum not far from Les Eyzies, perforated, and then planted in the abri, waiting to be found." He hunched his shoulders. "They did an investigation, the claim turned out to be accurate, and that was that. The whole thing was discredited as a fraud."

"Wow, I can see how that would have made a few waves."

"More than a few. Anyhow, the question of whether Ely actually perpetrated the whole thing or just innocently fell for it has never been settled, and I'm hoping I can come up with some answers, or at least some credible possibilities. So the very first thing I want to do is sit down and see what the institute people have to say about it now, almost three years later. "

"After you look at Inspector Joly's bones for him, you mean."

"Oh, that," said Gideon carelessly. "How much work can that take?"

If all his forensic cases were like this, he would have been a happy man.

Dry. No gore, no brains, no guts, nothing greasy, nothing putrid, nothing nasty. Just clean, dry bones. The only smell, aside from the not-unpleasant fustiness of the bones themselves-not so very different from that of old books or decaying leather-was the damp, woodsy fragrance of the mosses and lichens that had managed to gain a foothold in the dim, rocky crevices at the base of the walls. It was almost like working at an early-man site.