Evolution

"All from the bone, yes. You know, even after a couple of centuries’ work, we have dug up no more that two thousand individuals from our prehistory: two thousand people, that’s all, from all the billions who went before us into the dark. And from that handful of bones we have had to try to infer the whole tangled history of mankind and all the precursor species, all the way back to what happened to our line after the dinosaur-killer comet." And yet, she thought wistfully, lacking a time machine, the patient labor of archaeology was all there was, the only window into the past.

Bex was starting to look distant again.

Joan remembered a trip she had taken to Hell Creek, Montana, when she was about this girl’s age, thirteen or fourteen. Her mother had been working there because it was a famous dinosaur-extinction boundary site. You could see traces of the huge event that had ended the dinosaur era, there in the rocks, in a layer of gray clay no thicker than her hand; it was the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary clay, laid down in the first years after the impact. It was full of ash, the fallout of a huge disaster.

And underneath the clay, one day, her mother had found a tooth.

"Joan, this isn’t just a tooth. I think it’s a Purgatorius tooth."

"Say what?"

Her mother was big, bluff, her face coated with sweat and dust. "Purgatorius. A dinosaur-era mammal. Found it right under the boundary clay."

"You can tell all that from a tooth?"

"Sure. I mean, look at this thing. It’s a precise piece of dental engineering, already the result of a hundred and fifty million years of evolution. It’s all connected, you see. If you’re a mammal you need specialized teeth so you can shear your food more rapidly, because you have to fuel a faster metabolism. But if your mother produces milk, you don’t need to be born with your final set of teeth; the specialist tools can grow in place later. Didn’t you ever wonder why you had milk teeth? Joan, a lot of people are going to care a great deal about this. You know why? Because it’s a primate. This little scrap could be all that’s left of the most remote ancestor of you and me — and everybody alive — and the chimps and gorillas and lemurs and—"

And so on. The usual lecture, from the great Professor Useb. Joan, at age thirteen, had been a lot more interested in spectacular dinosaur skulls than ratty little teeth like this. But still, something about it had stuck in her mind. And, in the end, such moments had shaped her life.

"That’s the point of the conference, you see, Bex," Alyce was saying. "It’s a synthesis. We want to pull together the best understanding we have of how we got here, we humans. We want to tell the story of humankind. Because now we have to decide how we are going to deal with the future. Our theme is the globalization of empathy."

That was true. The real purpose of the conference, known only to Joan, Alyce, and a few close colleagues, was to found a new movement, establish a new way of thinking, a new approach that might actually stave off the human-induced extinction event.

Bex shrugged. "You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far."

Joan forced a smile. "No offense taken. We’re going to try anyway. Somebody has to."

"And there’s no point in all that stuff anymore, is there? Your archaeology."

Joan frowned. "What do you mean?"

Bex clapped her hands over her mouth. "I shouldn’t say anything. My mother will be furious." Her Martian eyes were bright.

Alyce had withdrawn into herself again; she gazed out of the window at the billowing debris of forest fires a thousand kilometers away.

Suppose I threw you down the strata, back into time, Joan’s mother had said to her. After just a hundred thousand years you’d lose that nice high forehead of yours. Your upright-walker legs would be gone after three or four million years. You’d grow your tail back after twenty-five million years. After thirty-five million, you’d lose the last of your ape features, like your teeth; after that you’d be a monkey, child. And then you’d keep on shrinking. Forty million years deep you’d look something like a lemur. And eventually -

Eventually, she would be a little ratty thing, hiding from dinosaurs.