CRO-MAGNON (12 page)

“
Supposition again. Any scientist worth his salt—”

“
And she’s tall and muscular because the original anatomically modern humans were a couple of inches taller than today’s average European. And the muscle attachments on their bones show they were more robust.”

“
She also looks to have an unusually voluminous brain,” Blaine said, not wanting to spend precious time arguing. “Even considering her large size.”

“
Yes, Cro-Magnons had larger brains than modern people. As did the Neanderthals.” Calder’s tone turned sardonic. “Facts that have gone curiously unpublicized by both scientists and laymen.”

“
Let’s see what else we’ve got,” Blaine said, though what they had already seen had overwhelmed her almost beyond the ability to think.

Calder nodded, and they plodded over a rising floor toward the rear of the cave, the light from their propped flashlights throwing pale shadows beyond the prone bodies. Under the weight of the air tanks, it was slow work to keep their footing on the irregular ice. Blaine slipped again and went to one knee.

Calder steadied her tank and said, “Let’s take a breather,” his muffled voice echoing in the icy chamber.

Happy to comply, she sank to her knees and glanced at him. “I’m surprised they set up housekeeping in a permafrosted cave.”

Calder pointed to three circles of dried grasses near the right side of the cave, a split-willow basket of honeycombs lying beside one. “Frost pits. Good way to store food. Much as I hate to disturb the site, I’ll need to dig into them if there’s time after we measure and sample the bodies.”

“
Considering our limited dive schedule and the need for genetic viability analysis, it’s going to take me a few visits.”

“
Me, too.” Calder stood and began to move into the acclivity at the rear of the cave.

Blaine suppressed a shiver as she followed him. “It must have been damn cold in here, year round.”

“
Remember, this region was more frigid at the time, so it would have been really cold outside in winter, probably colder than the cave. And windy.”

“
But why walk all the way to the back of the tunnel? Some places were wide enough to live in.”

Calder pointed back to the stone hearth and adjacent fire pit by the child’s body. “Easier to heat the back end.”

A gutted fish lay adjacent to the pit, the skeleton resembling a sturgeon’s, and Blaine could see strips of flesh interspersed with wood chips. “They must have made trips all the way to the Panj,” she said. “A fish this size couldn’t have lived in the shallow stream that must have run through the valley before it became dammed.”

“
Look’s like a shovelnose,” Calder said. “They must have been bigger then.”

“
It’s a pallid sturgeon,” Blaine said. “Similar to a shovelnose but larger.”

“
You’re an expert on fish as well as humans and mice?” he said in a long-suffering tone.

“
In graduate school I worked on a genetic study of riverine fish for the state of Wisconsin. We used microsatellite primers to detect genetic differences. We found that shovelnose and pallid sturgeons are genetically identical except for four or five alleles.”

“
Microsatellite? Sounds like a space—” He held up a gloved hand. “Never mind.”

She shined her light on two objects nearby: a wood-hafted obsidian knife and a quartz hand ax. They lay at casual angles near a hollowed and blackened stone with a wick of twisted fiber. Nearby sat a chunk of rock salt and a section of honeycomb. Beyond, the beam reflected off the white bark of a chopped birch log.

“
Looks like they were beginning to cook the sturgeon when the calamity struck.” She glanced around the icy floor. “It must have been quick and dirty. The coals got scattered.”

“
They were kippering the fish to extend its shelf life.”

Blaine glanced around at the close confines. “I should think they’d have been asphyxiated.”

“
The crack continued at the back of the cave and led to the surface.”

She looked up in surprise. “How do you know that?”

Calder pointed to the ceiling of the cave, where a black stain showed through the coating of ice leading from the kitchen area toward the rear.

“
An air current existed. The chimney must have been pinched off by the same big quake that dammed the stream to form the lake. Otherwise, with nothing to contain the air pressure, the cave would have flooded.”

Blaine nodded. “Even so, it would take a rugged and canny breed to live like this.”

“
No argument.”

She surveyed the bodies. “All three look hale.” She paused to examine them more closely. Each could have served as a poster person for physical fitness and the woman, she thought, was good-looking by any standards. If all prehistoric peoples looked like this . . .

She looked at Calder. “To what do you attribute mankind’s physical regression—height, robustness, brain size—during the Holocene?”

“
Farming,” he said without pausing.

“
Farming?” Shrugging to balance her air tank, Blaine shook her head. “From genetic studies, we know that a population explosion began about eleven thousand years ago. So there must have been enough food.”

“
Quantity went up but variety declined. The underclass, which was most people, went without proper nourishment. So they grew smaller.”

She sensed Calder’s smile behind his mask.

“
Males of European stock have recovered only to an average of five foot nine,” he said. “Like me. And that, only recently.”

“
That would explain the decrease in stature and robusticity,” she said. “But not necessarily brain size.”

“
Assuming that in a particular species, greater cranial capacity means greater intelligence—a relationship we can’t certify but which Occam’s razor implies—the Cro-Magnons and also the Neanderthals, perhaps in a somewhat different way, may have been smarter on the average than modern people.”

“
That doesn’t answer my question.”

“
Maybe it does,” Calder said, his mask-muffled voice reverberating in the confined space. “Consider that in a hunter-gather society, the fittest and smartest people are most likely to survive and breed.”

Calder glanced at his watch and signaled, and they both stood.

“
While in a civilized society based on farming and industry, people of lesser health and intelligence are protected. Over the millennia, the human race was stunted and dumbed down.”

Blaine stood and resumed plodding toward the shapes in the rear, careful not to slip again. “That has an elitist ring.”

“
Indeed it does. Definitely non-PC. That’s why no one wants to discuss it. Sort of like Hitler’s racist misinformation ruining the Aryans as a useful historical reference.”

“
I’m getting the germ of an idea,” Blaine said.

“
What?”

Fearing she’d sound outlandish, she shook her head.

Calder peered at her. “As a team, we need to share everything.”

“
I need time. Later.”

Calder plodded past her toward the rear of the cave, and she watched him check the earthquake gauge that Salomon’s diver had planted.

“
There’s been some minor activity,” he said. “But this simple instrument doesn’t tell us when. I’m resetting the sensor.” He looked up. “We should go in about eight minutes.”

Wanting a look at whatever lay at the rear of the cave, Blaine shuffled closer. As she neared the recumbent shapes, she saw that the tawny mass was a huge lion. Its fur looked untypically long, and it sported a black stripe down its neck in place of a mane. Knowing that lions were sexually dimorphic, and refusing to believe that such a large specimen could be female, she peered at its loins.

It was spectacularly male.

She reared for a better view of the animal. Reclining partially on its back, it was wedged in the angle of the walls, its hindquarters splayed as if it had decided to rest there. The front claws and muzzle were covered with blood. But the most extraordinary features were the thick wood shaft impaling the lion’s gaping mouth, and the body of a large wolf lying across the shaggy chest. Blaine could see that the spear had been thrust with tremendous force. It had rammed straight through the big cat’s heavy skull, the bloodied flint tip protruding from the rear.

Shadows came and went as Calder played his headlamp around the cave. She heard him muttering about what must have happened but she was too mesmerized by the gory scene to turn.

She switched her gaze to the wolf sprawled across the lion’s trunk. Its ribs had been crushed on the right side but its jaws were still clamped on the lion’s throat. It did not look young. Although its naturally gray coat had obviously grizzled further, the prominent ruff still had a yellowish cast. Had all prehistoric European wolves possessed that feature, comparable to the lion’s black stripe?

She inched over as Calder crept alongside. They crouched there a moment, their breathing rattling their regulators, before Blaine spoke around her mouthpiece.

“
My god,” she said.

Calder swept his arm. “Our god or theirs?”

“
I can’t believe this.”

“
Believe it.” He pointed at the lion’s stripe where the main would normally tuft the spine, then shined his light on the streamlined tail. “According to prehistoric paintings, cave lions had a shaggy coat but no mane and no tuft of hair at the end of the tail. And of course no other lion grew this large, before or since.”

“
How about wolves? Did they have yellow ruffs?”

“
Based on the few depictions I’ve seen, no. This one was probably distinctive.”

She motioned toward the prehistoric man. “He must have been tremendously strong, to thrust the spear all the way through that thick skull.”

“
More proof of who he was.”

Suppressing a shudder, she focused her beam on the man’s torn throat. “Especially as he must have already been dying.”

Calder nodded. “Nobody but a Neanderthal could have managed that.” He gestured at the flint point protruding from the rear of the lion’s head. “The spear looks Neanderthal, too.”

“
How so?”

He focused his lamp. “That’s a Levallois point, designed for stabbing at close quarters. And see how it was glued into the split shaft before being bound with sinew? That’s a special pitch. We know from sites in the Harz Mountains that Neanderthals used if for securing spear points, and also, we think, for chewing to combat toothache.”

“
So? I’d expect them to use pine pitch, or something.”

“
This stuff was made from birch resin.”

She shrugged. “Pine, birch. Is this the way you go on in your classes?”

Even in the uncertain light, Calder looked annoyed underneath his breathing mask. “This stuff was a much better adhesive than pine pitch and a lot harder to make. It required temperatures of four hundred degrees Centigrade, which meant a hot fire.” He glanced toward the middle of the cave. “We think they learned it from the Cro-Magnons.”

“
I’ll take your word.”

“
Also, see the groove around the spear?”

Blaine peered at butt end of the spear. She could see an indentation circling the shaft.

“
Are you going to claim the groove fit a spear thrower?” she said. “I thought they weren’t invented until later.”

“
That’s right. I think the groove was for tying a line to the spear in order to spear fish.”

“
So?”

“
Some paleo authorities believe the Neanderthals didn’t eat much fish and that their failure to fully exploit their resources contributed to their downfall. But in this cave, we have proof that fish were part of their diet.”

“
Not necessarily,” Blaine said. “Maybe the Cro-Magnon woman”—she had accepted Calder’s identifications—“taught the man to fish.”

She took a final look at the lion and wolf, then adjusted the focus of her headlamp to shine on the three humans. “I wonder what exactly happened here.”

“
Armageddon.”

“
But how could they all die, even the lion? I don’t see how a man, woman, and child in cramped quarters could have battled an animal that ferocious.”

“
We’ll figure it later.” Calder glanced at his watch. “We’re a minute over, which is probably okay for the first dive. But we need to set the heater and start back.”

Blaine was still in shock over what they had found. “Heater?”

“
To thaw the ice over the drawings.”

“
Drawings?” She had been completely absorbed in the grisly tableau.

“
What you’re supposedly here to do, remember?”

He directed the beam from his headlamp along the left-hand wall, which was also illuminated by the two propped flashlights, and Blaine realized she had forgotten about the colors she’d seen when she first shined her light.

“
Paintings, actually,” Calder said. “They cover both walls, and seem to be arranged in panels.”

Moving quickly, he paced to the front of the cave by the water-filled tunnel, opened his mesh diver’s bag, and took out a portable propane heater. Blaine followed, and watched him fiddle with the heater, which looked like an oversized flashlight with a grilled lens. She didn’t see a flame as he straightened, unfolded a wire stand, and aimed the device at the first section of wall.