by Wil McCarthy
In fact, the Vedic peoples measured units of time in everything from microseconds to gigayears, and distance from angstroms to A.U., so if anything I’ve underestimated the sophistication of their society. What did they need with all these measurements? And by the way, I’m offended by suggestions that this information must have been handed over by aliens visiting the Earth. Ancient peoples had the same brains we use today, and we know they maintained a healthy interest in astronomy. The Vedas contain no reference to the speed of sound, but that’s a much easier measurement, so yeah, they probably had that, too.
Boats: The boating details in this section are mostly drawn from the modern (and ancient) sport of dragon boat racing, which is surprisingly popular in my landlocked city of Denver, Colorado. True aficionados of the sport will realize I’ve altered some of the basic commands to be, perhaps, more consistent with the way ancient peoples would have viewed them. Reed boats of the sort described here are made throughout the world, and probably rely on designs handed down since well before the dawn of civilization. Coating their hulls with bitumen is described in the Epic of Atra-Hasis, which (if the legend is true) implies this technology was known in the Antediluvian world.
Notes on Part Two: The Monsters
The Trolls: Neandertals were slightly shorter than their Cro-Magnon or European Early Modern Human (EEMH) cousins, but more heavily muscled, with more robust skeletons and larger, heavier skulls. In straight-up unarmed combat, a Cro-Magnon without modern aikido skills would not have stood much chance against a Neandertal, although he could almost certainly outrun the fight. Neandertals were slightly less intelligent, despite larger brains, and they had heavy brow ridges, weak chins, and sloping foreheads. They were highly carnivorous, and occasionally cannibalistic, so they were probably not above catching and eating the occasional EEMH.
However, despite their apelike image in popular culture, they’re known to have made not only tailored animal-skin clothing and stone-tipped spears, but also tents and musical instruments, cave paintings and beaded necklaces. Given their long residence in Ice Age Europe, they were most likely pale-skinned, and as prone to sunburn as modern Norwegians. This didn’t mean they were nocturnal, but they would probably have been at least somewhat photophobic if they knew what was good for them.
Researchers used to believe that ginger-colored hair passed into the Homo sapiens genome through contact with Neandertals, although this has since been disproven. However, the Neandertals did have a variety of genes related to hair and eye color, and very likely had as much variety in this area as modern Europeans. And for the same reason their skins were probably light, they likely had their own genes for blonde, brunette, and ginger, and perhaps light-colored eyes as well. And yes, even H. sapiens has the lipochrome pigment necessary to produce yellow irises, although they’re rare. There’s zero evidence that Neandertals had pointed ears; I totally made that up. However, there’s also no evidence that they didn’t, and it would certainly fit with a lot of our myths. Pointy ears occur sometimes in our own species as a random mutation, or as deliberate body modification, and they’re relatively common in other primates as well, so it’s actually not a very drastic speculation.
Based on reconstructions of their voiceboxes, Neandertals were anatomically capable of speech, but they probably really did have loud, shrill, nasal, gravelly voices that resembled, for example, the male actors from Monty Python badly presenting themselves as women. Interested readers can find an example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o589CAu73UM, or by searching “Neanderthal high-pitched voice theory.” Although they did possess the two key mutations in the FOXP2 language gene that set humans apart from other great apes and hominins, Neandertals had a slightly different version of the gene than we see today in anatomically modern humans. They also had differences in other genes that interact with FOXP2, and perhaps different levels of gene expression as well. Today, many researchers insist Homo neanderthalensis had the same power of speech as Homo sapiens, but there’s no way to prove this, and as a technologist I tend to doubt it. Their progress was just too slow to indicate they were talking things over, or handing down oral traditions. My layman’s guess is that, through a combination of cultural and biological factors, they had words but not complex grammar.
Even without pointed ears, all of this makes them a dead ringer for the trolls, ogres, goblins, and kobolds of European mythology, and this strikes me as a very unlikely coincidence indeed. Also, while Neandertals in movies and TV shows are inevitably portrayed as ugly brutes, their women and especially children would have been more gracile in appearance. An image search for “beautiful Neanderthal” will turn up facial reconstructions that, while not quite modern human, reveal a softer side to this species, and perhaps some hint as to why our two species might, at least occasionally, have wanted to mate with one another. Perhaps these are our elves and gnomes and pixies and dwarves?
None of this is intended to disparage the Neandertals, or to imply that they were in any way subhuman. In fact, they were among the cleverest members of the human genus, fully capable of interbreeding with us, and they would have had all the same thoughts and emotions we do. They buried their dead with flowers and trinkets, and for many thousands of years they were close competitors for the domination of Europe. We oughtn’t be too smug about that; according to Dr. Jill Shapiro of Columbia University, over that kind of time frame a mere two percent difference in survival rates is enough for one population to crowd another off the map. However, we humans do love our differences, and have a sad tendency to dehumanize one another, and that’s why Argur’s people consider their neighbors to be “monsters.” The opinions of a character in a book do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
The Humans: The Cro-Magnon or EEMH people were anatomically and genetically modern humans, though slightly larger (and larger-brained) than the people of today. As recent immigrants from East Africa, they were most likely brown-skinned and black-haired, and they brought with them a culture significantly more complex than that of the Neandertals. More specifically, Argur’s people belong to the Gravettian culture, which was known to have rope, nets, cloth, pottery, fences, and a fondness for clay animals and voluptuous “Venus” figurines. And that’s just the stuff that’s survived for us to inspect; we only know about the rope and nets and textiles because we’ve found impressions of them in pottery fragments. Anything made of leather, wicker, wood, wool, or plant fiber has long since rotted away.
The valley of Nog La is loosely based on the Dolní Věstonice archaeological site in the Czech Republic. There is no evidence of wooden castles here, but fences made from bone suggest the idea would have been well within the bounds of Gravettian technology and imagination. The Knights of Ell are entirely made up, but Dolní Věstonice does appear to be the permanent home of an organized people who harvested wild grain and processed it into flour. That such a society might have a part-time warrior caste is hardly unlikely. Likewise there’s no evidence for beer, but come on, seriously, they had grain and pottery, water and time. You do the math.
The “leverthrow” in this story is actually called an atlatl or spear thrower, whose appearance in Europe has only been conclusively dated to about 21,000 years ago (21 kya), and there’s no direct evidence of these in Gravettian culture, either. However, the technology is suspected to have seen use in Europe as early as 30 kya (see Science and Technology in World History: an Introduction, by James Edward McClellan), before being gradually edged out by bows and arrows. If they were made of wood, we’d never find them, so it’s a supportable speculation. Several threads of evidence suggest dogs were first domesticated around this time as well. All in all, the Gravettians appear to have more in common with later Neolithic farmers than they do with the “cave men” of popular imagination, implying that the roots of civilization go back a lot farther than we’ve thought.
One thing conspicuously absent from the archaeological record is evidence of large-scale conflict between Neandertals and EE
MHs, who lived alongside one another in Europe for at least 5,400 years. Just for reference, 5,400 years ago the pyramids did not yet exist, Egypt was barely civilized, and the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Eridu were the most advanced in the world. That’s a long time, and if our two species coexisted for a similar span, they must have known each other very well indeed. Given the physical superiority of one group and the technological superiority of the other, one suspects there was a mutual reluctance to start anything more serious than the occasional skirmish, raid, rape, murder, or kidnapping.
Importantly, except in Spain the Neandertals are now thought to have become extinct in Europe no later than 39 kya, which would mean the humans overlapping with them were not Gravettians. The Gravettian culture didn’t begin until around 33 kya, and the specific settlement at Dolní Věstonice, on which I’ve based this story, is dated at 26 kya. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and for purposes of this story I’m assuming that comparable Cro-Magnon settlements existed as early as approximately 30 kya, and also that the endangered species of “trolls” persisted until at least that time, and possibly longer, in isolated pockets whose remains we simply haven’t uncovered. Improbable? Ask the dwarf mammoths of Wrangel Island, Russia, which survived until about 3,700 BP—eighty centuries after their extinction in the rest of Eurasia.
We should remember that modern Europeans are neither Cro-Magnon nor Neandertal, but a hybrid of the two species (or subspecies), with an additional 30–40 kiloyears of evolution into that environment, plus inward diffusion of genes from elsewhere in the world—notably India. The language of Nog La is based very loosely on Basque, which is non-Indo-European and could plausibly represent the last remnants of Cro-Magnon speech.
The Monsters: The Boolis (named for my wife’s favorite cat, with a similar personality) is an Elasmothere or Siberian Unicorn—a burly, rhinoceroslike species that’s thought to have gone extinct around 29 kya. The skulls of these creatures are dominated by a large horn socket between the eyes, although the horns themselves were made of keratin (basically, hair) and have not been preserved, so it’s anyone’s guess what they looked like. In speculative artwork the horn is usually portrayed as being very long and sharp, but the engineer in me finds this unlikely, as this would unbalance the head and require a lot of unnecessary energy to carry around. I suspect the horns were more like maces or war hammers: short, stout, and relatively blunt. This does not, however, rule out the possibility that younger boolises were thinner, lighter, and sharper-horned—more like the mythical Asian kirin or European unicorn—with the horn gradually growing wider (tree-ring style) as the animal grew. Some accounts suggest the elasmothere may have persisted into historical times in China, Mongolia, and Siberia as, again, a highly endangered species, although these reports sometimes describe the “unicorn” as deerlike rather than bovine in build. So who knows.
As for dragon bones…in her books The First Fossil Hunters and Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Adrienne Mayor makes clear that fossils were well known in the ancient world, and that “primitive” peoples were often capable of correctly deducing their origins and antiquity. In fact, later, more sophisticated societies tended to try to fit the bones to their own local mythologies (e.g., “hero’s bones” to the Greeks), so their paleontology skills were actually worse. According to Mayor, mythical creatures such as the griffin are simply accurate descriptions of well-preserved fossils.
Notes on Part Three: The Garden
During the 2000s, when I was the science and technology correspondent for the SciFi channel (later renamed SyFy), I wrote three pop-science essays that were the genesis of this story: “Speaking in Tongues, Baby,” “The Suburbs of Eden,” and “Adam and Eve and Lara and Fox.”
In the first of these, I reiterated the observations of others, that (a) the grammar of pidgin languages is the same all over the world, (b) babytalk is the same all over the world, and (c) this appears to reflect the “deep wiring” of the language centers of our brains. In other words, we may still carry the vestiges of an innate language.
Extinct ancient languages such as proto-Indo-European have been reconstructed by working backward from the words in their descendant languages, and even earlier languages have been reconstructed by examining the similarities between these proto-languages. Obviously this process gets less accurate the further you go back, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to reconstruct “Ursprache” or “Proto-Human,” the hypothetical “original” human language. An interesting snapshot can be found in the 1997 NOVA episode “In Search of the First Language,” and a more current summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language. If these controversial reconstructions have any validity, by the way, the name Tik-Tik means something like “fingers.” Also, the word “puta,” slang for vagina, occurs today in every language group throughout the world, and may in fact be an Ursprache noun that’s been preserved in daily use for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Wow.
Still, my thought at the time was that this reconstruction process, however fascinating and useful, skips over a rather obvious idea: that Ursprache likely combined a babytalk-esque vocabulary with a pidgin grammar. I also remember hearing, in a different documentary whose title I can no longer locate, that statistically speaking across all six thousand human languages and the backward reconstructions thereof, the words for mother contain an “M” sound too frequently to be a coincidence, while words for father tend to contain a “P” or “F.” Hence, my use of “mama” and “pfo-pfo” as Ursprache words for mother and father.
In “Adam and Eve and Lara and Fox,” I discussed the sudden arrival of the FOXP2 “language gene” mutation, which affects the development of certain key structures on the left side of the brain and enabled the rise of complex language. This was once thought to have occurred fairly recently—between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago—although the date has since been pushed back to at least 300 kya. However, FOXP2 doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but interacts with a lot of other genes in complex ways. For example, mice with a genetically engineered human FOXP2 gene can sing like birds, but they can’t repeat words the way a parrot can. And in the archaeological record, we see a sudden explosion in Homo sapiens technology and wanderlust at about 50 kya, plus or minus a few thousand, despite zero changes in anatomy or brain volume. I’m not alone in thinking that’s a smoking gun for some kind of language revolution. A change in gene expression, maybe?
At the time the article was written, Y-Chromosome Adam was believed to have lived around 59 kya, plus or minus a few thousand. Another unlikely coincidence in our two-million-year history! Since then, older Y-chromosome haplogroups have been identified, pushing Adam’s date back to 200–300 kya, but all this means is that most humans are descended from an Adam-like figure who lived right around the time complex new technologies started appearing. That’s plenty good enough for our purposes here.
Anyway, the modern form of FOXP2 is strongly conserved in our genome, and revertant forms are strongly selected against. The mutation seems to have diffused rapidly through the African population, so it seemed to me there must, at some point in our ancient history, have been a small tribe of really popular people spreading it around. I’ll admit I may have the date wrong, but even if we push it back to 300 kya and set it among the common ancestors of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, a story much like this one probably did really occur.
In this book, the culture of the Talking People is loosely based on that of Africa’s Khoi-san, who today are an endangered population, but were once prevalent across much of the continent, until crowded out by Bantu-speaking farmers. For a variety of linguistic and genetic reasons, the Khoi-san are believed to be the ancestors of all (or nearly all) non-African humans, so it’s logical to place Adam among them, or whatever version of them existed back then. The Khoi-san language is tonal, like Mandarin, and includes various clicks and pops rarely found outside of Africa, which probably means Ursprache had these featur
es as well.
In the final essay, “The Suburbs of Eden,” I pointed out that social and sexual practices among the Khoi-san bore some striking parallels to modern suburbia, making them perhaps more relatable than other peoples with very different practices. Thus, my use of phrases like “housing development” and “commute to work.”
For this book I’ve opted to follow the “deep wiring” language models, and assume that regardless of the actual words they used, the Talking People (who, mind you, must actually have existed in some form) would speak a tonal language full of African click noises, whose grammar would resemble pidgin and whose word construction would resemble babytalk. I’ll happily buy a beer for anyone who can prove this hypothesis wrong.
Notes on Part Four: The Voyage
Species Identification: Is Ba a Homo erectus? Some archaeologists would classify him as H. ergaster, while others say H. ergaster and H. erectus are simply regional variants of the same species. For simplicity I’ve assumed the latter, although for purposes of this story it only matters because H. erectus is better known. Sexual practices within this species are not well known, but I have tried to place them about halfway between the habits of bonobos and the hunting/gathering societies of anatomically modern humans. The lack of violence and sexual jealousy when a strange male encounters a new tribe—in fact, the de-fusing of tension through sex—may seem strange to us, but really does occur with bonobos.
