CRO-MAGNON (16 page)

Blaine caressed the sliver of bone, thrilled to be fingering a technological implement that had last known human touch tens of thousands of years ago.

“
So that gives us a fix?” she said.

“
Not necessarily. For all we know, needles were developed earlier and we just haven’t found any. But as Mathiessen estimated, it does place us within the Aurignacian tool complex, brought to Europe and points east by the incoming Cro-Magnons. That industry lasted from about forty to thirty thousand years ago, before being refined into the Gravettian.”

“
I need a closer estimate than that for my sorting program. Have we got anything else?”

Calder dropped another object onto the table. This one made a clonk, and when he lifted his hand, Blaine saw a chunk of translucent stone. It was elongated, with a sharp edge and convex back.

She peered at it before glancing up. “A knife?”

He nodded. “But not just any knife. This one is of the kitchen variety.”

She reached to touch it, but Calder stayed her hand. “Careful. That edge is five times sharper than a steel scalpel.”

She looked up. “Other than that, what’s special about it?”

“
For one thing, it’s not Aurignacian. Nor is it Mousterian, the culture of the Neanderthals that lasted from about a hundred thousand years ago until the Cro-Magnons entered Europe.”

She sighed. “So the knife’s not Neanderthal.”

“
I didn’t say that.”

Blaine felt exasperated. In her experience, this futzing around was typical of bone-lovers.

“
Please don’t keep me hanging.”

“
That’s the trouble with geneticists,” Calder said with a touch of aspersion. “You don’t want to look at other evidence.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts, glaring at him.

He gingerly lifted the stone knife and pointed to the back where a piece had been struck off. “This flat area was shaped to fit the index finger. An Aurignacian characteristic.”

He rotated the knife lovingly, the yellow light from Ayni’s kerosene lantern glinting off its many facets.

“
Other than that, its principal similarities lie with the Mousterian. The blade looks as if it was struck from a Levallois core, a Mousterian technique. I believe core is lying by the hearth in the cave.”

Blaine tapped her foot. “So, when was the knife made?”

“
I believe it’s from what we call the Chatelperronian culture,” Blaine noticed he avoided a direct answer. “Since Chatelperronian tools are almost always found sandwiched between Mousterian and Aurignacian layers, we suspect they represent a borrowing by the Neanderthals of the Cro-Magnons’ technology.”

Blaine was feeling increasingly impatient. Quantifiable characteristics, not funny names, were her stock.
Bone lovers!

“
So, are you going to give me a date?”

Calder laid down the knife. “Yes, but I want you to understand what you’re getting. Although there’s some controversy, the Chatelperronian seems to have lasted from about thirty-six thousand to thirty-two thousand years before the present in Europe. But it may have lingered in isolated pockets in Central Asia to perhaps thirty thousand BP.”

“
So, the known advent of needles would place us not earlier than about thirty thousand years ago,” Blaine said. “And the knife would suggest a date not much later.”

Calder gently laid something else beside the flint knife and bone needle. Blaine looked down at the exaggerated female ivory figurine and again gaped at its beauty.

“
The Venus is one of the earliest examples of sculpture,” Calder said. “The first one, found near Willendorf, Austria, was twice this large but no more exquisite. Others have been found over a wide area.”

“
And?”

“
Obviously, they were intended to be portable. A prime example of mobiliary art—that is, something to be carried on one’s person.

Blaine leaned forward. “What does it tell us?”

Calder reached down and rubbed his thumb over the exaggerated breasts and belly, and Blaine thought there was something erotic in the gesture.

“
To be carried so casually, these must have been common in the woman’s home tribe.”

Blaine tapped again. “I meant, date-wise.” His donnish manner raveled her nerves.

“
None have been dated precisely, but Venus figures have been estimated at thirty to twenty-five thousand years old.”

“
So, all considered, you’re telling me these people most probably lived about thirty thousand BP,” Blaine said.

Calder nodded, caressing the Venus again.

“
That’s a long time,” she said, “even on a cosmic scale. Starlight we now see coming from the center of the galaxy was just starting out.”

“
It’s in line with both the geologist’s and Mathiessen’s horseback estimates.”

“
Accuracy?”

Calder pursed. “Give or take a thousand or two.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Genetic drift could be significant.”

He laid down the figurine. “Without sophisticated dating equipment, it’s the best I can do.”

Blaine’s lip curled. “Phone the media! Finally, a date I can use.”

#

Later, lying comfortably in her sleeping bag on Ayni’s bunk, Blaine said, “Did you need to take half the evening for that estimate?”

After a short pause, Calder said, “If you want a rational explanation of the factors involved.” He sounded as if he’d been asleep.

“
I think you were showing off.”

“
Even using several factors, arriving at an accurate period is never simple. I should think as a geneticist you’d appreciate that. Even dates derived by carbon-fourteen and other scientific methods only bracket an approximate time. And your so-called genetic clocks are certainly erratic.”

“
Your ‘factors’ are bones and stones,” she said. “Which you can interpret any way you like, particularly if it supports your Multiregional Evolution fantasy.”

“
It’s a hypothesis, not a fantasy. The result of decades of field work by dozens of people.”

“
It’s crap,” she said.

“
I suppose your Out-of-Africa replacement scheme is established fact.”

“
It’s what the genetics tell us.”

“
You mean it’s what a bunch of error-prone statistical techniques applied to incomplete genes suggests to someone who’s already biased. Talk about questionable methods!”

“
At least they’re scientific.”

“
As opposed to . . .?”

“
Practicing voodoo over some bones.”

“
Maybe anatomically modern humans completely replaced archaic humans around the world, and maybe they didn’t. But you genetics ‘experts’ will have to get way more accurate before anyone will take your opinions seriously.”

“
Speak for yourself,” she said.

“
How about the child? You can see he’s hybrid.”

“
Probably. But that by itself means nothing. To paraphrase Frank Sulloway, one contribution from a dying race does not make a gene pool, and ten are no better than one.”

“
He was talking about anecdotes, not genes.”

“
We don’t even know if the boy would have been fertile.” She glanced toward Calder in the dark. “You said you’d know more about what happened in the cave after you studied the paintings.”

“
Indeed,” Calder said. “They were painted by the woman in the cave, using tufts of fur glued to sticks.”

“
How do you know that?”

“
You won’t take my word for anything, will you?”

She snorted. “The word of a tape jockey.”

“
I know she painted them because of smudges on her furs. And I found several brushes—one for each color.”

“
All right, I accept that. But can you tell me anything about their lives?”

“
Quite a bit.” She heard Calder shift in his sleeping bag. “The three females are sitting in a Cro-Magnon springtime encampment.”

“
I see that it’s spring, by the cattail shoots the women and children are gathering in the second painting. But how do you know they’re Cro-Magnon?”

“
From their culture, as I told you. Their fitted clothes and the fact that they’re sewing other skins in the first picture. Plus, you can see tents in the background.”

“
So?”

“
Neanderthals lived in rock shelters, or tents that we think were smaller than those in the painting, judging from the few post holes we’ve found. And we know they didn’t congregate in groups that large.”

“
Is the woman in the cave definitely one of the three in the painting?”

“
Almost certainly,” he said. “I already mentioned that the woman in the center has the same upturned nose as the woman in the painting, where it was slightly caricatured. And her necklace looks the same. The long-legged woman has the same nose, but she’s too old.”

“
Conjecture. Next, you’ll be telling me what they’re talking about.”

“
I can take a swipe at that, too.”

Blaine grinned in the darkness. “Boy, they must grow good weed out there in Io-way.”

“
Judging from present-day hunter-gatherers, the women in the second painting are gathering food. As you said, primarily cattails, which were a staple of Native Americans and probably of other prehistoric peoples, since they have many uses. A female seems to be escaping the clutches of a male, probably a community guard, who seems to have sexual designs, judging by the bulge in his loin cloth. The scale is small, but the woman has a suggestion of the tip-tilted nose from the first picture. Jumping to the final scene, the woman is obviously escaping from the man and his friends, and she’s desperate enough to leap off a cliff.”

Calder paused and Blaine, interested now, rose up on an elbow. “Which means?”

“
The man wants her.”

“
But she doesn’t want him.”

“
And that may be what the three women are discussing. The older one looks like the other woman’s mother. She may have been counseling her.”

Despite a desire not to let Calder get the upper hand in the expedition, Blaine felt herself drawn into his story of the prehistoric people.

“
What about the third picture?” she said. “Assuming we’ve got them in the right order.”

“
The man with the feather is probably the tribal chief. The young woman and man look like the ones in the other pictures. From their stances—the artist is remarkably subtle—I get the impression the chief may be ordering the woman to accept the man.”

Blaine’s eyelids sagged, a sign that the day’s strenuous and nerve-wracking events had depleted her reserves. With an effort she pushed away the urge to sleep.

“
Pretty speculative.”

“
You do better.”

“
I can’t. As an expert on prehistoric art, what do you make of the Venus?”

“
That, I don’t know. Maybe religious, maybe a fertility symbol, maybe something else. So far, no one has been able to assign a definite meaning.”

“
You mean there’s something about these people that you haven’t pinned down? I’m flabbergasted.”

“
One should be cautious about transferring modern concepts to prehistoric peoples.”

Blaine persisted: “What’s your opinion, then? Religious idol, or not?”

“
Most of us assume the Venus is a fertility symbol. But it could be more.”

Blaine realized that Calder was a conservative investigator. But at least he was willing to make educated guesses about the meanings of the paintings, and that was good for her. The more she knew about these people, particularly interactions between the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, the better off she would be in making genetic assessments, especially in regard to intermixing, which she now had to admit was a possibility. And also in developing the admittedly ambitious idea that she was reluctant to broach. She decided to press for more details even if it they were hypothetical.

“
So,” she said, “even thirty thousand years ago, women had to deal with abusive men.”

“
You tell me. We see three men chasing a woman. The fugitive leaps off a bluff. You’ll recall that a portion of the river was visible in the painting, showing rapids. And we know the water would have been freezing.”

“
You’re saying she made a choice: ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!
’
”

“
Obviously. Though it couldn’t have come to that, or we wouldn’t have the paintings.”

Blaine felt herself sinking into sleep. “Not bad for the first day, Ian.”

“
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, kid,” Calder said in a bad Humphrey Bogart lisp.

Blaine’s mind drifted, sifting the paleoanthropologist’s tentative assessments of the four paintings and finally focusing on the group of three women. Calder had implied they were discussing the mating status of the one in the center, presumably the same woman who had wound up in the frozen cave with a Neanderthal and a hybrid child. How had that come about? Judging from the actions in the four paintings, the woman had run smack into the law of unintended consequences. Or had she been too frantic to even think about the future?