Hominids (12 page)

In 1994, Mary had made a name for herself recovering genetic material from a 30,000-year-old bear found frozen in Yukon permafrost. And so, two years later, when the
Rheinisches Amt fur Bodendenkmalpflege
—the agency responsible for archeology in the Rhineland—decided it was time to see whether any DNA could be extracted from the most famous fossil of all, the original Neanderthal man, they called on Mary. She’d been dubious: that specimen was desiccated, having never been frozen, and—opinions varied—it might be as old as 100,000 years, three times the age of the bear. Still, the challenge was irresistible. In June 1996, she’d flown to Bonn, then headed to the
Rheinisches Landesmuseum
, where the specimen was housed.

The best-known part—the browridged skullcap—was on public display, but the rest of the bones were kept in a steel box, within a steel cabinet, inside a room-sized steel vault. Mary was led into the safe by a German bone preparator named Hans. They wore protective plastic suits and surgeons’ masks; every precaution had to be taken against contaminating the bones with their own modern DNA. Yes, the original discoverers had doubtless contaminated the bones—but after a century and a half, their unprotected DNA on the surface should have degraded completely.

Mary could only take a very small piece of bone; the priests at Turin guarded their shroud with equal jealousy. Still, it was extraordinarily difficult for both her and Hans—like desecrating a great work of art. Mary found herself wiping away tears as Hans used a goldsmith’s saw to cut a semicircular chunk, just a centimeter wide and weighing only three grams, from the right humerus, the best preserved of all the bones.

Fortunately, the hard calcium carbonate in the outer layers of the bone should have afforded some protection for any of the original DNA within. Mary took the specimen back to her lab in Toronto and drilled tiny pieces out of it.

It took five months of painstaking work to extract a 379-nucleotide snippet from the control region of the Neanderthal’s mitochondrial DNA. Mary used the polymerase chain reaction to reproduce millions of copies of the recovered DNA, and she carefully sequenced it. She then checked the corresponding bit of mitochondrial DNA in 1,600 modern humans: Native Canadians, Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Every one of those 1,600 people had at least 371 nucleotides out of those 379 the same; the maximum deviation was just eight nucleotides.

But the Neanderthal DNA had an average of only 352 nucleotides in common with the modern specimens; it deviated by a whopping twenty-seven bases. Mary concluded that her kind of human and Neanderthals must have diverged from each other between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago for their DNA to be so different. In contrast, all modern humans probably shared a common ancestor 150,000 or 200,000 years in the past. Although the half-million-year-plus date for the Neanderthal/modern divergence was much more recent than the split between genus
Homo
and its closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, which occurred five to eight million years ago, it was still far enough back that Mary felt Neanderthals were probably a fully separate species from modern humans, not just a subspecies:
Homo neanderthalensis
, not
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
.

Others disagreed. Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan was sure that Neanderthal genes had been fully co-opted into modern Europeans; he felt any test strand that showed something different was, therefore, an aberrant sequence or a misinterpretation.

But many paleoanthropologists agreed with Mary’s analysis, although everyone—Mary included—said that further studies needed to be done to be sure … if only more Neanderthal DNA could be found.

And now, maybe, just maybe, more
had
been found. There was no way this Neanderthal man could be real, thought Mary, but if it were …

Mary closed her laptop and looked out the window. Northern Ontario spread out below her, with Canadian Shield rocks exposed in many places and aspen and birch dotting the landscape. The plane was beginning its descent.

Reuben Montego had no idea what Mary Vaughan looked like, but since there were no other passengers aboard the Inco jet, he didn’t have any trouble spotting her. She turned out to be white, in her late thirties, with honey-blond hair showing darker roots. She was perhaps ten pounds overweight, and, as she came closer, Reuben could see that she clearly hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.

“Professor Vaughan,” Reuben said, offering his hand. “I’m Reuben Montego, the M.D. at the Creighton Mine. Thank you so very much for coming up.” He indicated the young woman he’d picked up on the way to the Sudbury airport. “This is Gillian Ricci, the press officer for Inco; she’s going to look after you.”

Reuben thought Mary looked inordinately pleased to see the attractive young woman who was accompanying him; maybe the professor was a lesbian. He reached out to take the suitcase Mary was holding. “Here, let me help you.”

Mary relinquished the bag, but she fell in beside Gillian, rather than Reuben, as they walked across the tarmac, the summer sun beating down. Reuben and Gillian were both wearing sunglasses; Mary was squinting against the brightness, evidently having forgotten to bring a pair.

When they arrived at Reuben’s wine-colored Ford Explorer, Gillian politely began to get in the backseat, but Mary spoke up. “No, I’ll sit there,” she said. “I—ah—I want to stretch out.”

Her odd statement hung between them for a second, and then Reuben saw Gillian shrug a little and move up to the front passenger’s seat.

They drove directly to St. Joseph’s Health Centre, on Paris Street, just past the snowflake-shaped museum Science North. Along the way, Reuben briefed Mary about the accident at SNO and the strange man who had been found.

As they pulled into the hospital parking lot, Reuben saw three vans from local TV stations. Surely hospital security was keeping reporters away from Ponter, but, just as surely, the journalists would be following this story closely.

When they arrived at Room 3-G, Ponter was standing up, looking out the window, his broad back to them. He was waving—and Reuben realized that TV cameras must be trained up at his window.
A cooperative celebrity
, thought Reuben.
The media are going to love this guy.

Reuben coughed politely, and Ponter turned around. He was backlit by the window and still hard to make out. But as he stepped forward, the doctor enjoyed watching Mary’s jaw drop when she got her first good look at the Neanderthal. She’d briefly seen Ponter on TV, she’d said, but that seemingly hadn’t prepared her for the reality.

“So much for Carleton Coon,” Mary said, after apparently recovering her wits.

“Say what?” said Reuben sharply.

Mary looked puzzled, then flustered. “Oh, my, no. Carleton Coon. He was an American anthropologist. He’s the guy who said if you dressed a Neanderthal up in a Brooks Brothers suit, he’d have no trouble passing for a regular human.”

Reuben nodded. “Ah,” he said. Then: “Professor Mary Vaughan, I’d like you to meet Ponter.”

“Hello,” said the female voice from Ponter’s implant.

Reuben saw Mary’s eyes go wide. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “That thing on his wrist is talking.”

“What is it?” asked Mary. “A talking watch?”

“Much more.”

Mary leaned in for a look. “I don’t recognize those numerals, if that’s what they are,” she said. “And—say—aren’t they changing too fast for seconds?”

“You’ve got a good eye,” said Reuben. “Yeah, they are. The display uses ten distinct numerals, although none of them look like any I’ve ever seen. And I timed it: it increments every 0.86 seconds, which, if you work it out, is exactly one one-hundred-thousandth of a day. In other words, it’s a decimal-counting Earth-based time display. And, as you can see, it’s a very sophisticated device. That’s not an LCD; I don’t know what it is, but it’s readable no matter what angle you look at it or how much light is falling on it.”

“My name is Hak,” said the implant on the strange man’s left wrist. “I am Ponter’s Companion.”

“Ah,” said Mary, straightening up. “Um, glad to know you.”

Ponter made a series of deep sounds that Mary couldn’t understand. Hak said, “Ponter is glad to know you, too.”

“We spent the morning having a language lesson,” said Reuben, looking now at Mary. “As you can see, we’ve made some real progress.”

“Apparently,” said Mary, astonished.

“Hak, Ponter,” said Reuben. “This is Gillian.”

“Hello,” said Hak. Ponter nodded in agreement.

“Hello,” said Gillian, trying, Reuben thought, to remain composed.

“Hak is—well, I guess ‘computer’ is the right term. A talking, portable computer.” Reuben smiled. “Beats all hell out of my Palm Pilot.”

“Does—does
anyone
make a device like that?” asked Gillian.

“Not as far as I know,” said Reuben. “But she—Hak—has an apparently perfect memory. Tell her a word once, and she’s got it for good.”

“And this man, this Ponter, he really doesn’t speak English?” asked Mary.

“No,” said Reuben.

“Incredible,” said Mary. “Incredible.”

Ponter’s implant bleeped.

“Incredible,” repeated Reuben, turning to Ponter. “It means not believable”—another
bleep
—“not true.” He faced Mary again. “We worked out the concepts of
true
and
false
using some simple math, but, as you can see, we’ve still got a ways to go. For one thing, although it clearly seems easier for Hak, with her perfect memory, to learn English, than for us to learn her language, neither she nor Ponter can make the
ee
sound, and—”

“Really?” said Mary. She looked quite earnest, Reuben thought. He nodded.

“Your name is Mare,” said Hak, demonstrating the point. “Her name is Gillian.”

“That’s—that’s amazing,” said Mary.

“Is it?” said Reuben. “Why?”

Mary took a deep breath. “There’s been a lot of debate over the years about whether Neanderthals could speak, and, if they could, what range of sounds they could have made.”

“And?” said Reuben.

“Some linguists think they couldn’t have made the
ee
phoneme, because their mouths would have been much longer than ours.”

“So he
is
a Neanderthal!” declared Reuben.

Mary took another breath, then let it slowly out. “Well, that’s what I’m here to find out, isn’t it?” She set down the small bag she’d been carrying and opened it up. She then pulled out a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on. Next, she removed a plastic jar full of cotton swabs and extracted one.

“I need you to get him to open his mouth,” said Mary.

Reuben nodded. “That one’s easy.” He turned to Ponter. “Ponter, open mouth.”

There was a second’s lag—Hak, Reuben had learned, could convey the translation to Ponter without the others hearing it. Ponter rolled his continuous blond eyebrow up his browridge—quite a startling sight—as if surprised by the request, but did as he was asked.

Reuben was astonished. He’d had a friend in high school who could stuff his own fist all the way into his mouth. But Ponter’s mouth went back so far and was so capacious, he probably could have stuffed in not just his fist but a third of his forearm as well.

Mary moved in tentatively and reached her swab into Ponter’s mouth, swiping it across the inside of his long, angled cheek. “Cells in the mouth slough off easily,” she said, by way of explanation, apparently noting Gillian’s quizzical expression. “It’s the simplest way to take a DNA specimen.” She pulled out the swab, immediately transferred it to a sterile container, sealed, then labeled the container, and said, “Okay, that’s all I need.”

Reuben smiled at Gillian, then at Mary. “Great,” he said. “When will we know for sure?”

“Well, I’ve got to get back to Toronto, and—”

“Of course, if you want,” said Reuben, “but, well, I called a friend of mine in Laurentian’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Laurentian’s a tiny university, but they’ve got a great lab that does contract DNA forensics work for the RCMP and the OPP. You could do your work there.”

“Inco will certainly put you up at the Ramada,” added Gillian.

Mary was clearly taken aback. “I …” But then she seemed to reconsider. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, why not?”

Now that Jasmel had agreed to speak on Adikor’s behalf, the next step should have been for him to take her out to the Rim and show her the scene of the so-called crime. But Adikor begged Jasmel’s indulgence for a daytenth or so, saying there was one more errand he had to run here in the Center.

Ponter, of course, had had Klast as his woman-mate; Adikor remembered her fondly, and had been very sad when she’d died. But Adikor had a woman of his own, and she, wonderfully, was still very much alive. Adikor had known the lovely Lurt Fradlo as long as he’d known Ponter, and he and Lurt had one son, Dab, a 148. Still, despite knowing her that long, Adikor had only occasionally been to Lurt’s chemistry lab; after all, when Two became One, it was a holiday and nobody went to work. Fortunately, his Companion knew the way, and it directed him there.

Lurt’s lab was made entirely of stone; although there was only a small chance of an explosion in any chemistry lab, safety dictated making the structure out of something that could contain blasts and fires.

The front door to the lab building was open. Adikor walked in.

“Healthy day,” said a woman, doing, Adikor thought, an admirable job of hiding her surprise at seeing a man here at this time of month.

“Healthy day,” replied Adikor. “I’m looking for Lurt Fradlo,”

“She’s down that hall.”

Adikor smiled and headed along the corridor. “Healthy day,” he called, as he stuck his head in the door to Lurt’s lab.

Lurt turned around, a big grin on her lovely face. “Adikor!” She closed the distance between them and gave him a hug. “What a pleasant surprise!”