CRO-MAGNON by Robert Stimson Read Free Book Online Page A

should be stumping for tenure at the university. The thought cast a pall of . . . what?
    Anxiety? Fear? Or something else?
    What were they doing here, anyway? Were there actually prehistoric bodies in the submerged cave? Or was this a product of nitrogen narcosis or posturing for attention? His stomach rumbled and he shifted his weight in the sprung seat. He didn’t doubt there were human remains.
    But Neanderthal? Cro-Magnon? A possible hybrid? That was a stretch. Probably some local hunters had taken shelter in the cave before the tunnel had flooded, then become trapped somehow. The lion could have died previously.
    The flight attendant served a meal of dark bread and cold cuts. Calder chewed stolidly, washing the food down with bitter tea. He managed to fall asleep until rough air woke him. He glanced out the window at wisps of clouds littering a vast darkness.
    Despite his excitement when Mathiessen had first told them, he knew it was unlikely that human bodies could have remained intact for tens of thousands of years. They’d have to be frozen solid. Wouldn’t the water that sealed the cave entrance tend to raise the temperature in summer?
    He turned to Blaine. “The water temp would thaw them seasonally.”
    She was spooning some poisonous-looking pudding that Calder had decided to pass up.
    “ What?”
    “ The lake water would get warmer in the summer, and the bodies would partially thaw. Over thousands of years, decomposition would set in. Genetic information would be lost.”
    “ The permafrost should have kept them from deteriorating,” she said. “We won’t know until we see.”
    “ I think we’ll find a party of local inhabitants, probably from the nineteenth century but possibly from medieval times.”
    “ I think they’re going to be prehistoric.”
    “ That’s like believing in the Abominable Snowman,” Calder said. “If it gets out that we mounted an expedition expecting to find an intact Neanderthal, we’ll be laughed out of town by the scientific establishment.”
    “ Who cares?”
    “ I do,” he said. “Unlike you, I do paleoanthropology for a living.”
    He watched a well-shaped lip curl. It wasn’t enough, he thought, that they were on opposite sides of the controversy surrounding the evolution of modern humans. Now they seemed at odds over the mission that had been thrust on them.
    “ What could the ‘scientific establishment’ do?” she said.
    “ My book would be turned down. I’d fail to make tenure, become unemployable, end up a shovel bum.”
    She smirked. “Shovel bum?”
    “ Itinerant archaeological worker. I’m already on shaky ground.”
    “ That’s because you keep touting that multiregional evolution so-called hypothesis.”
    “ You bad-mouthing my paper at Albuquerque didn’t help. When I got back, Hannah Lamb—”
    Blaine made a face. “That’s your own fault. Everybody knows now that Neanderthal and other archaic people were replaced by anatomically modern humans.”
    “ Not true. Milford Wolpoff and many other paleoanthropologists still back MRE.”
    “ As I said at Albuquerque, they’re behind the times. What about experts like Chris Stringer? He arrived at Out-of-Africa on the basis of fossil evidence.”
    “ Just because Neanderthals and their tool kits disappear from the archaeological record twenty-seven thousand years ago doesn’t mean they got replaced. They could have been assimilated by the more numerous Cro-Magnons.”
    “ Their genetic signature disappears as well.”
    Calder shook his head. “You geneticists. Ever since the Stoneking paper claimed we’re all descended from an African woman of two hundred thousand years ago, you people are like kids with a new plastic toy.”
    “ We’re not playing, any more than you physical anthropologists are.”
    “ The Mitochondrial Eve theory was discredited, and now you’ve moved on to the Out-of-Africa model, which is almost as absurd.”
    “ Human genes provide a decipherable record,