there’s not that much difference between us and chimps either, but I haven’t heard of any hot romances lately, have you? Not that I’m definitively on the other side either. There are still plenty of uncertainties.”
“But you’re the one who did that analysis on the skeletons.”
“Well, one of the team, yes. Don’t forget, there were Lyle and Harvey too.”
“Don’t be modest. You were the senior author of the paper. And if the child is a hybrid between the humans and-”
“That’s the issue, Julie. We never used the term hybrid. We just described what we found.”
“You weaseled, in other words.”
“Precisely.” He laughed. “Well, no, not that I haven’t been known to weasel when the situation demanded it, but in this case the data just didn’t warrant anything more conclusive See, most of the differences between Neanderthal and human skeletons are really quantitative, not qualitative. Oh, there are some specific, pretty minor distinctions – Neanderthal jawbones have this space behind their molars, the retromolar gap, that we don’t have, and there’s a difference in the shape of the mandibular foramen – but essentially, we’re talking about matters of scale.”
“The Neanderthals were bigger? More rugged?”
“Not bigger overall, no. They did have thicker bones, bigger brow ridges, bigger occipital buns; but we have bigger chins, bigger foreheads. And there are differences in the relative proportions of long-bone lengths. It’s that kind of thing. So, sure, we all can agree that such and such an adult skeleton is Neanderthal, and another one is human, but when it comes to somebody like the First Kid, Gibraltar Boy, he’s still a child; you’re dealing with traits that haven’t yet reached their adult form. He looks a little like both. So, yes, he might be a hybrid, or maybe you’re simply looking at a Neanderthal that just happened to have a smaller brow ridge than his friends. Or maybe you’re looking at a human child who had a receding chin.”
“Well, what do you think? I mean, you personally, not professionally? ”
“I honestly don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t be bowled over if he is a hybrid. I also wouldn’t be bowled over if he isn’t. Could be human. Could also be Neanderthal.”
“Oh, that’s helpful.”
“Sorry, it’s the best I can do. The thing is, it’s not as if we have thousands of Neanderthal remains to look at and compare. At most there are only a few hundred in the entire world, and most of those are just fragments, and very few are children, so we’re still learning what their traits were. Anyway, the truth is, I was more excited about the pathology on the female’s skeleton. That was something you could hang your hat on. The earliest known case of ankylosing spondylitis in a human being. Until Gibraltar Woman, the first case we knew about was from the Egyptian Neolithic, a good fifteen thousand years later!”
“I remember how excited about that you were.” She smiled. “I can see how excited you are about it now. And wasn’t there some graduate student somewhere who was going to do her dissertation on it?”
“Yes, from Cal, I think. She contacted me a year or so after Europa Point. She was pretty sure she’d run across another case of it from about the same time period, at some little site in Portugal, or was it Spain? Spain, I think. She thought there might be a dissertation topic there, on genetic anomalies among early modern humans.”
“And was there?”
“I don’t know. She e-mailed me a couple of times with questions and then I never heard from her again. Which probably means there wasn’t. Maybe the case she’d come across wasn’t ankylosing spondylitis after all; maybe it was just advanced arthritis and she hadn’t been able to tell the difference on her own. She probably found something else to work on.”
“Well, the runway’s clear, folks,” the captain announced. “We’re on our way in.”
There was scattered applause, and then, after a thoughtful pause, Julie said, “Gideon, back to the hybrid issue, what about those specific traits you mentioned? That space behind the molars, that mandibular foramen thing? Did Gibraltar Boy have them or didn’t he?”
“Moot point. The jawbone’s missing. They’re both partial skeletons, remember, and pretty banged up at that.”
“Okay, what about DNA? Wouldn’t that tell if he was human, or Neanderthal, or a mix?”
“No DNA. It’s always pretty iffy with things that old. In this case the bones have lost too much collagen for a reliable test.”
“So I guess we’ll never know for sure.”
“I guess we won’t.” He smiled. “I can live with it. There are more important things to worry about.”
FOUR
“The Rock itself,” said the donnish-looking, donnish-sounding gentleman to his huddled audience of four men and three women, “on the very crest of which we now stand, is, as most of you already know, not really a ‘rock’ in the sense of a single giant monolith, but a narrow, limestone spine running north-south for approximately, ah, mmm, three miles. The famous massive, perpendicular aspect that we know from photographs is simply its northern terminus. Now, to the west, behind us, it slopes less precipitously down to Gibraltar town, which you can see spread out approximately thirteen hundred feet below us – or rather four hundred meters, as the lords of Brussels now decree that I must say, ah-ha-ha.”
Donnish he might be, but in fact he was the only member of the group, other than Julie Oliver, who was not a teacher. Rowley G. Boyd, MA (Oxon), Gideon’s soon-to-be fellow author in Javelin’s Frontiers of Science series, was the director of the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology. It was the museum that had arranged this visit to the Rock (including a complimentary three-course lunch) for this group of five scholars and two spouses who had arrived a day early for the Paleoanthropological Society conference, so as to be able to participate in this evening’s symposium for Ivan Gunderson. Rowley had thought that the distinguished assemblage would appreciate a recreational outing to the top of Gibraltar’s celebrated monolith, even though several had been there before. Part of the treat was to have been the breathtaking ride up by cable car, but they’d had to drive up in a stuffy, uncomfortable taxi van instead because the cable was shut down today on account of the strong winds at the top.
Which was also the reason that Rowley’s audience was huddled so tightly.
“Now then, to the south,” he continued, “across the straits, the dun-colored mountains are the, ah, er, Atlas Mountains of Morocco. To the west, across Gibraltar Bay, we have Algeciras, Spain, about which, heh-heh, there is an amusing saying…”
But they were not to learn what the amusing saying about Algeciras was, at least not yet. Rowley was somewhat of a mumbler – a hem-and-hawer – at the best of times (an impediment not helped by the small, ceramic-bit pipe that was forever clenched between his teeth, usually unlit), and this morning’s wind gusts sporadically plucked the words out of his mouth and whirled them, unheard, out over the strait.
“Can’t hear a damn thing, Rowley,” said Audrey Godwin-Pope, the Horizon Foundation’s director of Field Archaeology, whose metallic, incisive voice would have had no difficulty being heard above buffeting that was far stronger than this. “Too windy. And please make an effort not to swallow your words.”
Rowley, taking no offense (Audrey was Audrey; what could one do?), expanded his chest and attempted to raise his volume a tad, though he didn’t go so far as to take the pipe from his mouth. “Yes, this wind is a curious meteorological phenomenon, you know, and unique to the Straits of Gibraltar. The Spaniards refer to it the poniente, and it-”
“Far be it from me to correct a native, Rowley, especially you, but I’m afraid you’re in error there,” said Adrian Vanderwater. “The poniente is the westerly wind that comes in from the Atlantic. This one, coming from the east, out of the Mediterranean, would be the levanter…”
“The levanter?” echoed Rowley, removing the pipe and tapping it against his teeth. “Are you sure? You know, I always remember the difference by-”
“… which, might I add, would mean that the rain and fog are not likely to be very far behind.”
“Well, whatever the hell you call it, it’s getting pretty bad out here,” Audrey grumped, drawing her coat around her lean, spiky frame. “The fog’s starting to come in, all right, and I just got a spatter of rain on my glasses.
