Watermark

by E. J. Kay

  “Yeah, but you still end up with a problem in evolution,” said Ben. “If all things evolve, where did God evolve from? What came before God? Who or what created him or her? All religions end up with this problem and so they turn to creationism. The belief in a God means you can’t pursue proper science.”

  Mike put his knife and fork down hard on the table. “Whoa, a massively simplistic overstatement, Ben. Islam doesn’t have anything like the same problem with evolution as Christianity does. I was brought up in Kenya, a very Christian country, but my mother was a Muslim, although somewhat lapsed towards the end of her life. Creationism is a very Christian phenomenon, and it’s just another example of how the doctrine of the Bible being taken literally precludes an open mind and leads to the suppression of science and scientists. You have to admit that Christianity has a pretty poor record on its treatment of scientists, with respect Reverend Whickham.” Jim nodded curtly. “Yet from the way things are reported in the press these days, we get the impression that Islam is a fundamentalist, repressive religion. In relation to science and technology that just isn’t the case. There isn’t really any contradiction between the Qu’ran and the theory of evolution as far as I know. And, an Islamic scholar in the mid eighteenth century wrote that between animals and men there are monkeys[5]. That predates Darwin by a hundred years.”

  “You make a good point,” said Jim, trying to appear reasonable but given away by the deepening furrows in his brow. “But my question about the apparently planned nature of life still remains.”

  “It was probably worked out by Arabic scholars two thousand years ago, but is buried in some texts somewhere that no one west of Turkey can be bothered to read!” said Mike, getting up and walking back towards the buffet table. Egraine watched him go, her eyes running down his back and resting on his buttocks. She grinned a little and got up to follow him, leaving the rest of them at the table to smile at each other in vague embarrassment.

  Egraine edged up to Mike as they refilled their plates at the buffet. “Dr Osewe, can I come and see you soon? I know you’ll be busy, but I think there’s a lot of synergy between your research interests and my research into bone structures in early Homo species. My thesis is on developing more sophisticated classifications between quadripedal and bipedal, which take account of hand development in primates. I wondered if you’d think about supervising my PhD. Alec was my supervisor so it makes sense that you might take over that role now that you’re directing the Nimue project. Could I come and see you about it tomorrow?”

  “Sure, I’m in tomorrow morning before eleven if you can make it then? You’ll need to bring your work so far as I’m not familiar with what you’ve been doing, but I’m happy to meet up and you can talk me through it. And like I said the other day, call me Mike.” He balanced a final chicken wing on top of his piled up plate and walked away from the buffet.

  Egraine's eyes settled on his bum again. I’d call you any time.

  ----------

  Kelly and Robson walked out of the hotel and into the car park. The woman they had seen before was standing by the gate post, watching the wake through the large bay windows of the hotel.

  “She’s there again,” said Kelly. “Have you remembered who she is?”

  A look of sudden recognition lit his face. “Tammy Walker!” He went over to talk to her but she hurried off before he got near her. “Hey, Tammy, just want a quick word love!”

  She broke into a trot and turned the corner at the end of the road without looking back.

  “So, who’s Tammy Walker?” asked Kelly, as Robson returned to the car, panting hard.

  “Local prostitute. Funny kid. Picked her up a few times for soliciting a couple of years ago, but haven’t seen anything of her in the last eighteen months.”

  “What’s she doing here then, I wonder? She certainly seemed interested in Dr Whickham’s funeral. Have you got her last known?”

  “We should have. I’ll check when we get back and then go and pay her a visit.”

  Chapter 15

  The morning after the funeral Joseph and Mike were back at work and the topic of conversation had turned back to Alec’s Watermark paper.

  “So, I still don’t get this link between language and water,” said Mike.

  “Well, the paper argues that understanding visual communication would be at a premium if a group of animals found themselves in an unfamiliar and potentially risky habitat. Of course, lots of animals do find themselves in those sorts of situations, but once you have an intelligent ape with the ability to understand rudimentary instrumental acts in that situation, natural selection will do the rest. It would be an advantage to communicate risks, food sources, things like that. After a while it may be that sexual selection took over from natural selection, or amplified it, so that good communicators were sexier than bad ones, as well as living longer.”

  “So I guess Alec argues that water was this unfamiliar and risky habitat,” said Mike.

  “Exactly. And then you add in a diet rich in fish and other sources of Omega three fats and voila! Increasing brain size and the seeds of language development.”

  “How does he explain the effect of water on the change from visual to auditory communication, then?”

  “Well, the adaptations in the vocal tract of humans that enable speech make it very different from those of the other great apes, as we know. So Burling asks the same question as Elaine Morgan. How and why did those changes come about? Burling speculates that voluntary control over the vocal tract came before language, as an adaptation that gave some other evolutionary benefit. He suggests singing or other forms of vocalisation, although I must admit that loses me a bit. Anyway, even though his answer might be stretching it, the question also chimes in perfectly with Elaine Morgan’s theory that it was due to our ancestors being dependant on water environments for food. So, there’s selection pressure for the ability to breath-hold for swimming and diving. It just so happens that the combination of larynx position and breath control in early Homo species enables them to make more meaningful speech sounds, but it was actually a by-product of water adaptations. However, once they could begin to communicate so effectively using vocal sounds the advantages meant that it was readily selected for and further adaptations then produced more control over the tongue and lips so that an even greater range of sounds could be made, with a constant selection bias for better and better socialisation and communication. These are the situations that make language more likely to develop and also account for the rapid acceleration in brain development over the past two million years or so. And, in particular, the evolutionary changes in the FOXP2 gene[6] since the split from the MRCA[7].”

  “Yeah, I had heard Alec talking about the position of the human larynx and breath-holding, but I guess it starts to have a bit more credence when the same question is asked from the perspective of a different discipline.”

  “There is one more, poignant, point that Alec, or whoever wrote this paper, makes,” said Joseph. “And when you hear this, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that Alec just would not have written it all himself.”

  Mike looked intrigued.

  “He makes the point that language comes at a price. The developments that are necessary in the brain to enable speech also mean that humans suffer from a unique range of mental disabilities ... like autism.”

  Mike raised his eyebrows.

  Joseph nodded and then went on. “And schizophrenia, both of which are connected to problems in areas of the brain that relate to language, particularly the connections between the right and left sides, according to some researchers. They’ve shown that schizophrenia manifests itself in the same way in all cultures. It appears to be a basic human trait, and it’s therefore at least possible that it was manifest in some form in our earlier ancestors as the brain developed to accommodate advances in language. It’s Burlings’ hypothesis that language ability could have developed gradually over a time period of millions of years, so it’s at least l
ikely that some of the mental dysfunctions that modern humans suffer developed alongside it. Language must, therefore, have conferred a significant advantage to make it worth the disabilities that accompany it.”

  “OK, I’m convinced. That line of argument doesn’t sound like Alec. Not his area of interest or expertise.”

  “Mmm. Like I said earlier, maybe I didn’t really know him. Maybe no one did.”

  “Any other bombshells?” asked Mike.

  “Not really. The paper’s still in draft form,” said Joseph, “and he has a few notes to himself about discussing functional hairlessness. Some interesting ideas about lice, actually.”

  “What?”

  “Well, he asks why we have the type of hair distribution we have - pubic hair, facial hair, armpit hair. And it looks like he was going to come down pretty clearly on the side of AHH, saying that it was due to spending a lot of time in water. But again, the notes relate to some areas of research I’ve never heard Alec speak of before.”

  “Like what?” asked Mike, getting up and walking over to the window.

  “The evolution of human parasites as one clue to the changing hair patterns of ancestors of Homo sapiens. Specifically lice. As we all know, humans have three species of louse to contend with; hair, body and pubic. The fact that humans are host to three different types of lice is apparently unusual in itself, as most species have just one, specialised louse. But, even more strangely, hair and body lice are related to the chimpanzee louse, but crab lice are related to the gorilla louse. By comparing the DNA of the human pubic louse and the modern gorilla louse, the split between the two seems to have taken place around three to three and a half million years ago, suggesting that for some reason, human ancestors became re-infested with the gorilla louse some time before that and made a final split from gorilla contact around three million years ago. How this might have happened is open to wide speculation, from sexual contact that resulted in some re-hybridisation of human ancestors, through to picking up stray lice that had fallen onto beds when human ancestors used old gorilla beds for sleeping. But, the fact that chimpanzees and the other great apes didn’t become re-infested with gorilla lice does suggest some kind of special contact between gorillas and proto-human species. It also suggests that proto-human species had hair that was both like the gorilla and like the chimpanzee more than three million years ago, as the species was infested by both types of louse.”

  Mike laughed. “You know, the rehybridisation theory has been put forward to explain some apparent anomalies in the human genome, too. Randy hominin females fancying a bit of rough.”

  Joseph raised his eyebrows and chuckled. “Juliet would love that. Another nail in the coffin of male-dominated evolution theories.”

  “So, what conclusions did Alec draw from all that?”

  “Well, that a stranding or separation of human ancestors happened around three million years ago and again that it was likely to involve water. That’s where the paper stops.”

  “This whole thing just keeps getting weirder,” said Mike. “What the hell was Alec really thinking?”

  “I thought I knew, but now, well ... I think he was working closely with someone else, that’s for sure.”

  Just then a knock came at the office door.

  “Come in,” Mike shouted. It was Egraine. Usually she had her hair tied back and wore lose fitting jumpers, but today she was dressed in tight jeans with a low cut top, and her hair was down, falling over her face in light brown waves. A little make up too; some mascara and lip gloss.

  “Hi Egraine,” said Joseph.

  Mike looked up and smiled. He hadn’t noticed what a good body she had before now, and then immediately told himself that it was inappropriate to think that. Inappropriate but, well, still inescapable.

  “Have a seat Egraine. Would you like a tea or coffee?” Mike walked over to the kettle.

  “Yes, coffee would be great thanks.” She turned to Joseph. “Actually, will this be disturbing for you Dr Connor?” She looked back to Mike. “We could go to one of the coffee bars. They’re still quiet at the moment.”

  “Yes, good idea,” said Mike, before Joseph had time to reply. He picked up his notebook and held the door open for Egraine. As she walked out in front of him, he turned to Joseph and winked. Joseph rolled his eyes in response.

  They walked down the corridor and into the Java Man coffee bar. “I’ll get these. What would you like?” asked Mike.

  “Oh, thank you, I’ll have an Americano please.” She ran her hand through her hair and smiled as she looked Mike in the eyes just a little longer than normal.

  He paid for the coffees and they sat at a corner table by the window.

  “So,” he said, “tell me about what you’re doing.”

  “I’ve been working with Alec for the past eighteen months on bone structures in early humans. As we were discussing yesterday, I feel there is too little effective differentiation between forms of locomotion and use of hands, so everything gets lumped together into bipedal or quadripedal. Apes are neither, in my view, and some monkeys and other primates aren’t either. To class them all as knuckle-walkers doesn’t tell the real story about the subtleties of the relationship between hand manipulation and forms of locomotion. I’ve been working on a different set of classifications …” She picked up her bag and began to look through the books and papers. “I’ve brought some sketches to show you what I mean …or, at least I thought I did. Oh, how annoying. I was sure I put them in here. I have a set of sketches and some models that I’ve been putting together from casts of ape and hominin bones. The models are in my flat. I must have left the sketches there too.”

  As she spoke she leaned forward to look through her bag. Her top was very low cut, and as she looked up she caught Mike looking at her breasts. He quickly raised his eyes, but she had seen his interest and smiled at him again.

  “It would be so much easier to show you what I mean rather than try to explain it. We could pop round to my flat just now, if you had the time?”

  The surprise of this sudden invitation made him start. “Er, no, I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, shame. How about later? I’m just in Rufus Court, it’s only ten minutes in the car. I could be there after two o’clock?” Her persistence made it difficult to say no.

  “I could make it at about two thirty, then, I suppose. Just for half an hour.”

  “Great! I’m in flat ten A.” She sipped her coffee and leaned back in her chair, running her fingers through her hair. “You said at Alec’s funeral that you were brought up in Kenya. Is that where you got interested in palaeontology?”

  “Yes, it was. Both my parents worked with the Leakey’s at the National Museums of Kenya and I used to go to work with them on occasions and see all the bones and fossils. I got fascinated. They come out of the ground like giant jigsaw puzzles and my mum and dad spent hours cleaning them and trying to put them back together.”

  “Are your mum and dad both from Kenya?” asked Egraine.

  “No, dad was from Huddersfield.” Mike grinned. “My mum and dad met when mum came over to do a Master’s degree in the UK on an exchange studentship. They got married in this country and dad took mum’s name as his was Badcock and he was fed up with it, he said.” Egraine laughed. “After they were married they went to live in Kenya for a few years to work at the National Museums. They both got research positions in universities here in the UK when I was nine, so we relocated here. I think dad was quite glad to be back living in the UK. The heat in Kenya used to really get to him. But he would never dream of coming back to the UK without mum. They were always inseparable.” Mike stirred his coffee. “They even died together.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” said Egraine.

  “Thanks. It was ten years ago. They were in a pile up on the M6. A foggy and icy night when some tosser in an SUV ran into them. He was driving too close and too fast, the usual thing.”

  “That must have been dreadful
for you. But it sounds like they were a happy and romantic couple.”

  “Mm, some of the racist intolerance they suffered when they came back from Kenya wasn’t very romantic.”

  “Oh no. Why?”

  “A white man married to a black woman, and an intelligent one with a science career too, wasn’t very acceptable in the 1980’s. Still isn’t, if we’re honest. Sophie and I get some strange looks sometimes, even now. I got called all kinds of things at school.”

  Egraine shook her head. “That’s dreadful. People can be so ignorant. Well, I agree with your dad. I think Africans are so much more attractive than pale Europeans.” She looked at him over the top of her coffee cup.

  Mike began to feel that things were moving a bit too fast and that he was being swept along with them. She was clearly attracted to him, and that recognition aroused him. But he knew it shouldn’t. He loved Sophie. Things were a bit stressed at the moment and there wasn’t much intimacy between them, but that would pass once the baby was born. Hopefully. He abruptly changed the subject.

  “So, what about you? How come you’re into digging up old bones?”

  “I’ve always been good at the sciences, but was bored by physics and chemistry. It sounds a bit corny, but I went on a school trip to the Natural History Museum one time and loved the dinosaur skeletons. I realised I wanted to do something that involved digging up bones, and then got interested in the debates around human evolution. Mum and dad have lived all over the world; my dad’s a diplomatic civil servant. So, on holidays from boarding school I used to go and stay with them in all sorts of exotic places. Africa, Egypt, the Middle East. I didn’t have many friends there of course, so I ended up spending a lot of time in museums and reading books.”