Harry Turtledove: A Different Flesh

Would it be any different in an alternate world, where Homo erectus still existed alongside of us Would we treat our evolutionary cousins any better than we've ever treated our own kind? Harry Turtledove takes a hard look at this question in A Different Flesh, and comes up with some answers we'd probably just as soon not hear.

Preface

WHERE DO:YOU get your ideas?

I've never known a science fiction writer who hasn't been asked that question a good many times. I'm no exception. And, as is true of most of my col eagues, the answers I give often leave guestioners unsatisfied. I've had ideas doing the dishes, taking a shower, driving the freeway. I don't know why they show up at times like those. They just seem to.

Sometimes ideas come because two things that by rights ought to be wildly separate somehow merge in a writer's mind. I had just finished watching the 1984 Winter Olympics when I happened to look at a Voyager picture of Saturn's moon Mimas, the one with the enormous crater that has a huge oentral peak. I wondered what skijumping down that enormous mountain, under that tiny gravity, would be like. A story followed shortly.

And sometimes ideas come because you look for them. Like most science-fiction writers, I read a lot. In late 1984, I was idly wondering how we would treat our primitive ancestor Australopithecus if he were alive today.

What I think of as my story-detector light went on. How would we treat our poor, not-quite-so-bright relations if we met them today. I soon dismissed the very primitive Australopithecus. As far as anyone knows, he lived only in Africa. But Homo crectus, modern man's immediate ancestor, was widespread in the Old World. What if, I thought, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, and what if no modern humans made the same trip later? That what-if was the origin of the book you hold in your hands.

The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians inhabit the New World is differem from ours in several ways. For one thing, the grand fauna of the Pleistocene, mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, glyptodons, what have you, might well have survived to the present day. Sims would be less efficient hunters than Indians, and would not have helped hurry the great beasts into extinction.

Human history starts looking different too. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion.

Central and South America, on the other hand, would have been more difficult: Spanish colonial society was based on the ruins of the American Indian empires. And Spain, without the loot it plundered from the Indians, probably would not have dominated sixteenth-century Europe to the extent it did in our history.

Also, the presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, could not have failed to have a powerful effect on European thought. Where did they come from? What was their relationship to humans? Having these questions posed so forcefully might well have led thinkers toward the idea of evolution long before Darwin. Sims might also make us look rather more careful y at the differences between various groups of ourselves.

To return to Gould's question: how would we treat sims. I fear that the short answer is, not very well. They are enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves. The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.

"The proper study of mankind is man." true enough. Sims can, I hope, help us look at ourselves by reflecting our view at an angle different from any we can get in this world. Come to think of it, that's one of the things science fiction in general can do. That's why it's fun.

Viled Bead Simia quam similis, turpissama hestia, nobis!

[The ape, vilest beast, how like us!] , Ennius, quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum found the new World a very different land from the one they had left. No people came down to the seashore to greet their ships. Before the arrival of European settlers, there were no people in North or South America. The most nearly human creatures present in the Americas were sims.

In the Old World, sims have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Fossils of creatures very much like present-day sims have been found in East Africa, on the island of Java, and in caves not far from Pekin, China. Sims must have crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America during an early glacial period of the Ice Age, when the sea level was much lower than it is now.

At the time when humans discovered the New World, smal hunting and gathering bands of sims lived throughout North and South America.

Their lives were more primitive than those of any human beings, for they knew how to make onty the most basic stone and wood tools, and were not even able to make fire for themselves (although they could use and maintain it if they found it).

Paradoxically, this very primitiveness makes them interesting to anthropologists, who see in them an il ustration of how humanity's ancient ancestors must have lived.

Despite their lack of weapons more formidable than chipped stones and sticks with fire-hardened points, sims often proved dangerous to colonists in the early days of European settlement of the New World.

As they learned to cope with attacks from bands of sims the settlers also had to learn new farming techniques needed for soils and climates different from those of their native lands. Hunger was their constant companion in the early years of the colonies.

Another reason for this was the necessity of bringing al seed grain across the Atlantic until surpluses could be built up. The Americas offered no native equivalent of wheat, rye, or barley for settlers to use.

Sims, of course, knew nothing of agriculture.

Nevertheless, the Spaniards and Portuguese succeeded in establishing colonies in Central and South ; America during the sixteen century.

The first English settlers in What is now the Federated Commonwealths was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1600.

From The Story of the Federated Commonwealths, by Ernest Simpson.

Reproduced by permission.

A Different Flesh

AFTER THIRTY MILD English summers, July in Virginia smote Edward Wingfield like a blast from hell. Sweat poured off him as he tramped through the forest a few miles from Jamestown in search of game. It clung, greasily, in the humid heat.

He held his crossbow cocked and ready. He also carried a loaded pistol in each boot, but the crossbow was silent and accurate at longer range, and it wasted no precious powder. The guns were only for emergencies.

Wingfield studied the dappled shadows. A little past noon, he guessed.

Before long he would have to turn round and head home for the colony. He had had a fairly good day: two rabbits, several small birds, and a fat gray squirrel hung from his belt.

He looked forward to fal and the harvest. If al went well this year, the colony would final y have enough wheat for bread and porridge and ale. How he wished, how al the Europeans wished, that this godforsaken new world offered wheat or barley or even oats of its own.

But it did not, so al seed grain had to cross the Atlantic. Jamestown had lived mostly on game and roots for three years now. Lean and leathery, Wingfield had forgotten what a hot, fresh loaf tasted like.

He remembered only that it was wonderful.

Something stirred in the undergrowth ahead. He froze. The motion came again. He spied a fine plump rabbit, its beady black eyes alert, its ears cocked for danger.