She paused, frowning as she laid the skull next to the packing box, and squatting down, stared at it along the tabletop.
‘The one set of candidates I can think of is the ramapithecines. One of the best areas for finding ramapithecine fossils is in the Himalayan foothills.’
‘The Siwalik Hills,’ prompted Jack.
‘So far, three sizes of ramapithecines have been found,’ said Swift. ‘My guess would be — and this is just a guess, of course, I’m going to have to do a lot of detective work with this guy before I’m sure — that the teeth would be characteristic of the largest of the ramapithecines. Come to that, the largest ever known hominoid, the Gigantopithecus.’
She fished in the box, took out the piece of jawbone, and then nodded.
‘It’s like I said. The size of these jaws suggests a gigantopithecine, while the position of the cranial crests seems to indicate an australopithecine.’
‘A hybrid of the two perhaps,’ suggested Jack.
Swift was shaking her head.
‘But there’s something I really don’t understand about this skull.’
‘What? What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused and then added, ‘I guess I’m just a little concerned that this specimen is in extraordinarily good condition for something that must have been around for such a long time.’
‘That’s cause for concern?’ Jack laughed. ‘You are hard to please.’
‘It’s my job to be sceptical. What were the atmospheric conditions like inside this cave?’
Jack shrugged as he transported his mind back to the bergschrund.
‘Well, dry, I guess. The cave — actually it was more of a cavern — well, it was made of limestone and about a hundred metres inside the mountain, at the end of a narrow corridor. Like the entrance to an Egyptian mummy’s tomb. Earth floor.’
‘Any stalagmites? Stalactites?’
‘Not that I could see. But then I’m not sure I really explored the whole cavern. A few icicles out front.’
‘Then would you say that it was quite a sheltered spot?’
‘Very. I spent a comfortable night there. Thanks in no small part to half a bottle of good scotch.’
‘The thing is, you’d expect more petrification.’
‘You would, huh?’
‘Especially around Limestone. Although you say the floor was earthen, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Even so,’ Swift said thoughtfully, ‘I’d have expected the skull to be more stonelike and less like the original bone. Fossilization is a slow metamorphosis and one we still don’t fully understand, but even so, this find should show more obvious signs of mineral invasion.’
Swift shook her head and started to gnaw at her Up.
‘But for my own preliminary observations—’
‘Gigantopithecine with a dash of australopithecine, right?’
‘Right. But for that, I might even go so far as to say—’
She scowled.
‘No, that’s simply impossible.’
‘You’re tired,’ said Jack. ‘You’re tired and you’ve had a good dinner and things will look different in the morning. It’ll make more sense in daylight. You’ll see.’
Jack put his arm around her waist.
‘C’mon. Let’s go to bed.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, yawning loudly. ‘I have drunk a bit too much.’
She followed him to the kitchen door. Before she switched out the light, she glanced at the skull one more time and laughed at the absurdity of what she had just been thinking.
The absurdity of thinking that possibly the best gigantopithecine fossil ever found didn’t look like a fossil at all.
Four
‘Every discovery of a fossil relic which appears to throw light on connecting links in man’s ancestry always has, and always will, arouse controversy.’
Swift hardly slept, although this had less to do with Jack than with the skull. Highly regarded by her colleagues and popular with the students, she knew she was an excellent teacher, but she was thirty-six years old and had published little. Within the faculty of paleoanthropology she faced tenure review, and in order to pass — to have her teaching contract renewed — she would have to write a paper of substance. Better yet, a book. Jack’s fossil seemed to provide her with something worth writing about.
At six o’clock, she slipped quietly out of bed, dressed quickly, and went downstairs with one thought on her mind. Leaving a note for Jack, who was still sleeping, she returned the skull to its box, carried it out to her car, and then drove straight to the university.
Things were quiet on campus. It was too early for the prophets, musicians, craft sellers, pushers, radicals, artists, and assorted academics who were normally found along Telegraph Avenue.
As soon as she was in her laboratory she closed the door and locked it. Only then did she remove the skull and the jaw fragment from the box and lay them carefully on a lab table that was specially padded to protect the sometimes fragile fossils that were examined upon it.
She measured the skull carefully with callipers and micrometer, then, laying some rulers on the table as a guide to size, she set up a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5 with a hundred-millimeter lens, a bounce Speedlite flash, and a ten-metre remote switch cable. When the camera was loaded with Fuji Reala, she started to take her photographs, shooting two rolls of thirty exposures each just to be on the safe side.
Only when she was satisfied that she had a good record of the basic dimensions and appearance of the skull did Swift proceed to the next stage of her working plan, the devising of which had kept her awake for most of the night.
She painted the skull with Bedacryl, a kind of glue that was usually used to harden fragile fossils before removing them from the ground. The skull was as solid an artifact as she had ever handled, but Swift preferred to err on the side of extreme caution. Even solid bone would break, if dropped from the height of a table or a workbench.
While the Bedacryl dried she set about heating gypsum to make a plaster of Paris cast. More sophisticated resin and stereolithographic casts could be made later on, but right now Swift wanted a working copy she could handle and carry around the campus in complete safety. As soon as the cast was made. Swift placed the original skull and jawbone in her laboratory safe. She planned to transfer them later to the university vault where other valuable specimens were stored.
Swift had also devoted some thought to the securing of her intellectual property in the specimen. If, as she suspected it would, the skull proved to be an important find, it was essential that she maintain complete confidentiality in her work until she was good and ready to publish. But it was also obvious that she could not work in a vacuum and that she would need the help of her colleagues on campus if she was going to classify it properly.
This was her main area of concern.
The paleoanthropological world was a contentious one, in which the discovery of a new fossil often made one person’s reputation at the expense of someone else’s. Lacking a properly empirical method and populated by people who frequently lacked objectivity, it was a jealous science driven not by experiment but by theory. And there were plenty of theories. Sometimes it seemed to Swift that the public’s appetite for popular science meant that there was a new theory about Man and his origins every week. But fossils were at a premium, and it was generally accepted that it was upon these that the greatest paleoanthropological reputations had been built. People remembered Dart, Johanson, Leakey, because they made tangible discoveries. Hardly anyone remembered the theorists like Le Gros Clark, or Clark Howell.