Philip Kerr: Esau

‘As I just said, it’s tools that make man the most efficient killer on the planet. But which came first, brain size or tools? Now, you might think that brain size would be a prerequisite for the manufacture of efficient tools. However, the fossil record shows that there is no such clear corollary. It might surprise you to know that forty thousand years ago. Neanderthal man possessed a brain that was larger than that of a modem human, and yet his tools show no great sophistication. Even so, I feel that Neanderthal’s larger brain size — about three percent larger than our own brains — ought to scotch any prejudices that because he had a recessive cranium. Neanderthal was somehow stupid. But quite what all his extra brain power was for, nobody really knows.

‘Whatever caused the conventionally held split between man and ape — what we like to term the Great Leap Forward — be it brain power or tool making, the reason must have occurred in only one-point-six percent of our genes. Perhaps you’d like to consider what that reason might be. Certainly whatever theories you come up with, they will have no more or less validity than what anyone else has devised so far. As you’ll all soon discover for yourselves, I hope, there’s little certainty in the world of paleoanthropology. Indeed, although we call it one of the natural sciences, there’s very little that’s scientific about it. Empirical method plays very little part in what we do...’

Swift glanced at her watch as a sixty-one-bell carillon rang out from the Campanile on Sproul Plaza. Three times a day it was the scene of a hand-played, ten-minute concert. This one marked midday and the end of her lecture. Her students were already standing up and putting away their notebooks and pens. ‘Okay,’ she said, raising her voice above the growing din, ‘we’d better leave it there. Just remember what Matt Cartmill of Duke University once said. He said that all sciences are odd in some way, but paleoanthropology is one of the oddest.’

‘That’s for sure,’ grumbled Todd. ‘Man, I was just getting used to the idea of being an ape.’

‘I can’t imagine that would take very long,’ said one of the female students pointedly. ‘I’ve seen you eat, Todd.’

Todd grinned good-naturedly.

‘But four different kinds of men?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can see how that might be good news for one of you. Maybe now you can get yourselves laid. But if you ask me, it’s kind of worrying. Think about it. All those chimps and gorillas and zoos? I mean, suppose they find out they’re not animals at all? Suppose they read the Constitution? Then we’ll really be in trouble.’

‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.’

Almost as soon as she had read them, as a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Alexander Pope’s lines became Swift’s motto and her whole philosophy of life. It seemed to her that she had always been interested in human origins, and a precociously early interest in sex and the facts of human reproduction was soon replaced by a rather more fundamental quest — to discover her own genetic heritage.

Yet there had occurred one particular moment of revelation when she had realized that she wanted to devote her life to ‘the proper study of mankind.’ It was perhaps appropriate that the moment should itself have been connected to a scene of symbolic revelation. When, with exquisite caution, the ape touched the monolith in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and was infected with the tool/weapon-making facility, he also touched Swift’s youthful imagination. This was the moment when, with a tumultuous fanfare of Nietzschean trumpets. Swift had perceived her way forward in life.

Now, years after the start of her own intellectual odyssey, the riddle of man’s Great Leap Forward — the genetic gift that had made Homo sapiens so special — was no less adamantine a mystery than Kubrick’s black and brooding monolith. And fundamentally, the mystery remained exactly that.

The divergent period between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had occurred only two hundred thousand years before — one-thirtieth of the time taken to separate apes and humans — with less than one-half of a percentage difference in their respective genomes, and yet Neanderthals had failed where Homo sapiens had succeeded.

Why?

There was not the least clue to chip the hard and ebony granite of this mystery.

The prevailing explanation of the Neanderthal/ Homo sapiens split — that modern man had developed the evolutionary advantage of language (paleoanthropology no longer placed emphasis on man the tool-making killer ape that had so appealed to Stanley Kubrick) — led to an even greater mystery.

What was the peculiar anatomical development that Neanderthals had failed to produce that had resulted in modern man’s capacity for meaningful speech?

It was a steep walk home up Euclid Avenue.

Like many of the homes in the Northside area of Berkeley, a quiet leafy neighbourhood popular with professionals and academics. Swift’s house was a half-timbered chalet that seemed to have been sculpted from the wooden landscape. The house was expensive, and it was her mother’s great bronzes, fetching big prices in the London and Manhattan salesrooms, that had paid for it.

Back in her airy, plant-filled study, with its book-lined gallery and her baby-grand piano. Swift unplugged the telephone and stretched out on the sofa to smoke a soothing cigarette. She was an infrequent smoker, using tobacco almost medicinally, seeking a tranquilizing effect. She took only a couple of deep drags from the Marlboro she held between fingers so heavily ringed with gold they looked like the keys on a saxophone and then stubbed it out. She was still considering how to spend what remained of the afternoon when she dozed off...

Awakening with a start. Swift glanced at her watch.

It was five o’clock.

So much for the afternoon.

The doorbell buzzed several times, like an angry wasp, as if someone had been pressing for a while. Who could it be? One of her students? One of her colleagues, perhaps? Her neighbour come to complain about her late-night piano playing?

‘Shit.’

Swift swung her long legs off the sofa and crossed the polished ash floor to press the intercom button.

‘Who is it?’ she sighed, scowling.

‘Jack,’ said the voice.

‘Jack,’ she repeated dumbly. ‘Jack who?’

‘Jesus, Swift. How many Jacks do you know? Jack Furness, of course.’

‘Jack?’

Swift screamed with delight and stabbed the button to open the front door. Pausing only to check her appearance in the heavy gilt mirror that hung in the hallway, she ran downstairs two steps at a time and flung open the door.

Jack stood on the doorstep, almost at attention, with a large wooden box under his thickly muscled arm, wearing a navy blue polo shirt, a brown tweed sportscoat, and a grin as big and shiny as his watch. He was thinner than she remembered, even a little drawn. It was plain from his weather-beaten face that he had endured considerable hardship on his Himalayan expedition. But she knew very little of the tragedy that had befallen him, beyond a couple of lines on CNN Online and in the San Francisco Chronicle the week before about how the two-man expedition to climb all the major peaks of the Himalayas in one year had ended in disaster when Didier Lauren was killed in an avalanche.

Swift flew into Jack’s arms and hugged him tightly before drawing back to fix him with an accusing eye.

‘Jack,’ she scolded. ‘What if I had been out? Why didn’t you call?’

‘I did. Your phone is unplugged.’

‘I mean, why didn’t you call from Nepal? Or write me a letter? Or, for that matter, an e-mail?’