Evolution

Soon they were joined by more women, older children, a few men. They followed ruts worn into the ground by innumerable feet. Some of the women gazed at Juna curiously — and the men speculatively — but they seemed exhausted before their day had even started. She wondered where they were all going. Nobody was carrying any weapons, any spears or snares or traps. They weren’t even looking for spoor, tracks or dung, any signifiers that animals had been here. They didn’t even look around at the land they inhabited.

At last she came to the open spaces she had glimpsed yesterday, the fields. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air.

Juna inspected the tool. It was like an ax, with a stone head fixed to a wooden handle by a binding of sinew and resin. But it was big, surely too heavy to use as an ax, yet the curved stone blade made it impractical to use even as a thrusting spear. As Gwerei yelled at her with increasing frustration, she just stared back.

At last Gwerei had to show her. She bent over the dirt, clasping the tool, and stuck the blade deep into the ground. Then she began to walk backward, legs stiff, bent over, dragging the blade through the earth. She had made a furrow a hand’s length deep in the ground.

Juna saw that other people were doing just as Gwerei had, dragging their curved axes through the ground. She remembered seeing people do this yesterday. It was so simple a task a child could have done it, with enough strength. But it was hard work. After engraving furrows just a few paces long they were all grunting, their faces slick with sweat and dirt.

Still Juna had no idea why they were doing this. But she took the tool from Gwerei and rammed the blade into the ground. Then she bent as Gwerei had done and hauled the handle backward, until she had scraped a furrow just like Gwerei’s. One woman clapped ironically.

Juna handed the tool back to Gwerei. "I’ve done that," she said in her own language. "Now what?"

The answer turned out to be simple. She had to do the same thing again, a little further on. And again after that. She, and the rest of the people here, had nothing to do but scrape these marks in the ground.

All day.

Where was the skill in this muck-scraping compared to even the simplest hunt, the setting of a rabbit snare? Did these people have no minds, no spirits? But perhaps this was part of the magic that the shamans here used to make their heaps of food, the abundance that allowed them to gather in great maggoty swarms and litter the ground with children. And besides, she reminded herself, she was a stranger here, and she must learn Gwerei’s ways, not the other way around.

So she bent to her dull, repetitive work. But before the sun had risen much higher, she longed to get away from this tedium, to be running on the high plain. And after a day of forcing her body — a machine exquisitely designed for walking, running, throwing — to endure this repetitive hard labor, the aches became so overwhelming that all she wanted was for it to stop.

The next day, she was taken to another field, and put to the same dull plowing. And the next day was the same.

And the day after that.

It was agriculture: primitive, but agriculture. This new way of living had never been planned. It just emerged, step by step.

As far back as Pebble’s time, even before true humans had emerged, people had been gathering the wild plants they favored and eliminating others that competed for resources. The domestication of animals had also begun accidentally. Dogs had learned to hunt with humans, and been rewarded for it. Goats had learned to follow human bands for the garbage they left behind — and the humans in turn learned to use the goats not just for their meat, but for their milk. For hundreds of thousands of years, there had been an unconscious selection of those plant and animal kinds most useful to humans. Now it had become conscious.

It had begun in a valley not far from here. For centuries the people there had enjoyed a steadily warming climate, and a rich diet of fruit, nuts, wild grains, and wild game. But then there had been a sudden drier, colder spell. The forests had shrunk back. The sources of wild food had begun to vanish.

So the people had focused their efforts on the grains they favored — the ones with big seeds that were easy to remove from the seed coats, and with nonshattering stalks that held all the seeds together — trying to ensure their growth at the expense of the less desirable plants around them.