I blinked at that and croaked feebly, “This place?”
“This place right here, Jared.”
This was not a question I could handle, so I just goggled at her.
“Ten thousand years ago, this region was the home of a Mesolithic people whose name we’ll never know. Dig in the ground and you’ll find their hand axes and spearheads. These were Leavers, of course—animists—and they knew where to find the god of this place. The god of this place is here, Jared. They didn’t look in the sky or on Mount Olympus. They looked here, where we’re sitting.”
I nodded. That was the most I was up for at this point.
“Here,” she said again, this time patting the ground in front of us.
“Okay.”
“Now I want you to look.”
I shook my head—just a little, just enough to say no, no thanks, I think I’ll pass on this one.
“Come on,” she commanded, and stretched out belly-down in the dust. Not happily, I followed suit.
In the center of the web
“Here is where you’ll learn everything,” she said. “Here is where it all comes together. This is the center of the web, where past, present, and future are joined and where the human mind was born. I want you to look. Don’t tell me again that you’re not Natty Bumppo. I heard you the first time. You don’t have to understand what you see but you must at least make an effort to see what you see.
“A few decades ago, at a time when Lamarckian notions were still occasionally offered as science, it was popularly theorized that what stimulated the primate brain to grow to human size was our ancestors’ mentally huffing and puffing to invent tools. This is of course what you’d expect in a culture like ours that equates advancement with tool use.”
I grunted, to let her know I was still awake.
“The fact is, however, that the human breakthrough wasn’t associated with any tool-making breakthrough. But it was associated with a different sort of breakthrough, a breakthrough as crucial to human development as the breakthrough to language. Any idea what I might be referring to?”
“No, none.”
“I’m not surprised. This breakthrough isn’t acknowledged in the Taker version of the human story—isn’t even mentioned, since it adds nothing to the glory of the Takers. This is the breakthrough that decisively signaled the acquisition of a uniquely human lifestyle, a lifestyle critically dependent on intelligence. This is the breakthrough that decisively separated us from the apes. Still no ideas?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“You evidently don’t remember discussing this with Charles on the train back from Stuttgart. You couldn’t imagine what our ancient ancestors might have achieved during the first three million years of human life, and he tried to show you that what they achieved was a fully human lifestyle.”
“Yes, I remember now. That conversation got rather … overwhelmed by events.”
“Travel among the gorillas and the chimpanzees and the orangutans, and you will be—or should be—struck by the fact that their lifestyle is nothing remotely like the lifestyle associated with even the earliest humans. The earliest humans, unlike those from whom they descended, were hunter-gatherers. Throughout the rest of the primate order, all are merely gatherers—foragers. They will and do kill for food, opportunistically, but none live as hunters. Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual. Humans could only succeed at hunting one way. They couldn’t succeed the eagle’s way or the cheetah’s way or the spider’s way. These were out of reach. They found their own way to succeed—a way that was out of reach of any other species on earth. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Jared? We didn’t become human banging rocks together. We became human reading the tale of events written here—here in the hand of the god.”
She opened her hand, palm up, to show me what she meant.
“I’m not an expert tracker, Jared, not by any means. Natives of this region—any of those Mesolithic hunters I mentioned earlier—wou
ld be able to tell you about things that had happened here days ago. Literally every slightest mark you see in the dust here is the record of an event, even if it’s only the track of a windblown leaf. They’d be able to identify every creature that left a mark here in the recent past, and they’d be able to tell you when it was here and what it was doing, whether it was hurrying or moseying, looking for something to eat or trying to get back home.
“I picked this spot to settle in, because I could see that something had happened here that I could probably figure out. I don’t mean that some great melodrama was played out here, just something. Do you see this curving line of tracks here? They look like they might have been made by pressing an outsize zipper in the dirt.”
“Yeah, I see them, now that you point them out.”
“This is the track of a beetle, I haven’t the least idea what species. Obviously a hefty fellow. The spoor is pretty fresh, not more than a few hours old. You can see where it crosses an older track here, the track of a squirrel.”
“Surprisingly enough I do see it.”
“Okay. Here comes the exciting part. The beetle is tooling along minding its own business, when suddenly from over here to the left a mouse leaps onto the scene to have a go at the beetle. You can see here, the way the tracks are bunched, that the mouse isn’t just strolling, it’s leaping. If we were in the United States, I’d say it was a chipmunk, but I don’t know what this might be, so I’ll call it a mouse. Anyway, the mouse grabs the beetle, and here you can see the marks where they scuffle.”
“Yes, I see them.”