Evolution

She did the only thing she could do. She turned and ran: ran to the west, away from the fire, away from her family.

She didn’t stop running until she came to a dense thicket of forest. Facing a blank, green wall, she hesitated for one heartbeat. Other dangers lurked here, but this place was surely invulnerable to the fire. She plunged inside.

Crouched close to the root of a tree fern, surrounded by damp clinging fronds, she peered out at the savannah. The fire still swept voraciously through the long grass, and smoke billowed, seeping into the dense forest. But this forest clump was indeed too dense and moist to be under threat. And the fire was quickly consuming its fuel; the rain was starting to douse the flames.

Soon she would be able to get out of here. She squatted down to wait it out.

A scuttling movement close to her foot drew her attention. At the base of the tree fern’s textured root a scorpion moved with metallic precision toward her foot. Without hesitation, but taking care to avoid the sting, she slammed the heel of her hand down on the scorpion. Carefully she picked up the scorpion between two fingers, and lifted it to her mouth.

Something rammed into her back. She was thrown forward onto her belly, with a mass on her back, hot, heavy, muscular. She was surrounded by screeching and hooting, and fists pounded at her back and head.

Winded, summoning up her strength, she rolled over.

A slim figure capered over her. It was not much more than half her height, with a skinny body covered with brown-black fur, long arms, an apelike head stuck over a narrow, conical chest, and a thin pink penis sticking out below its belly. Its fur was wet from the rain, and it stank, the smell musty and strong. And yet it — he — stood upright over her, like one of her own kind, like no ape.

This was a pithecine: an ape-man, a chimp-man, a representative of the first hominids of all, Far’s remote cousin. And there were more of them in the jumbled branches above her, climbing down like shadows.

She turned to get up. But something slammed against her head, and she fell into blackness.

When she came to she was flat on her back. Her chest, legs, and buttocks ached.

Pithecines were all around her.

Some of them had clambered into pod mahogany trees in search of fruit. Others were digging in the ground, pulling out corkwood roots. They were active, foraging bipeds, working wordlessly. But, unlike her, they were short, hairy, their skin slack like chimps’.

Somebody was screaming. Far turned her head to see.

A pithecine was crouched in the dirt. It — she — was straining, her face contorted, her slack breasts heavy with milk. Far, blearily, saw a small solid mass emerge from her rump: mucus-covered, hairy, it was the head of a baby. This pithecine woman was giving birth.

Other females surrounded her, sisters, cousins, and her mother. Chattering and hooting softly, they reached between the new mother’s legs. Gently they fumbled with the baby as, moistly, it was pushed out of the birth canal.

The new mother faced problems no earlier primate had endured, for the baby was being born facing away from her. Leaf, a female of Capo’s time, would have been able to see her baby’s face as it emerged, and would have been able to reach down between her legs to guide her baby’s head and body out of her birth canal. If this pithecine were to try that she would bend the baby’s neck backward and risk injuring its spinal cord, nerves, and muscles. She could not cope alone, as Leaf could have — but she did not have to.

When the baby’s hands were free, it grabbed at its mother’s fur and began to pull. Even now it was strong enough to aid in its own delivery.

It was all a consequence of bipedalism. A quadruped supported its abdominal organs with connective tissue hung from its backbone. The pelvis was just a connecting element that translated the pressure on the backbone down and outward to the hips and legs. But if you decided to walk upright your pelvis had to support the weight of your abdominal organs — and the weight of a growing embryo inside you. The pelvises of the upright pithecines had quickly adapted, becoming like a human’s basin-shaped supporting structure. The central opening for the birth canal changed too, becoming larger side to side than front to back, an oval shape to match a baby’s skull.

This pithecine mother’s birth canal was narrower in comparison to her baby’s head than any previous primate’s. Her baby had entered the canal facing its mother’s side, to let its head through. But then it had to turn so its shoulders lined up with the canal’s widest dimension. Sometimes the baby would finish up in the easiest position, facing its mother, but more often than not it would turn away from her.