‘But he did discover Lucy.’
Lucy was the name Johanson had originally given to those afarensis fossils he had discovered himself, in Tanzania.
‘Yes, but he still had to demote her fossils in order to promote his own.’
‘Point taken.’ Cody took out his pen but still hesitated to sign the document.
‘Look, Byron, fossils are data. And the naming of a fossil is everything in this business.’
‘Business? Now we’re getting to it. I thought you people were supposed to be scientists.’
‘Science is just business wearing a white coat,’ argued Swift. ‘Trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truths include covering your ass. If Galileo had been a little slower to take up a definite position on the Copernican theory—’
‘Or if he’d had the advice of a good attorney,’ grinned Cody. ‘Okay, okay. I’m convinced. Hurt, but convinced.’ He dashed off his signature and launched the document back across the desktop. ‘Now what’s the big deal?’
‘I want your opinion, as the country’s leading primatologist—’
‘I can resist any amount of flattery except the truth.’
‘—of a hominoid skull that has recently come into my possession.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser.’
Swift opened the wooden packing box, removed the cast of the skull, and waited for Cody to clear a space before placing it on the desk. Then she took a laptop computer out of her shoulder bag and switched it on, ready to note his first impressions.
Cody replaced the half-moons on the end of his nose, then picked up the skull, turning it expertly in both hands like a melon he was testing for ripeness.
‘Nice cast,’ he murmured. ‘Make it yourself?’
‘This morning.’
‘Where’s the original?’
‘Safe enough.’
‘Oops.’ Cody uttered a malicious little laugh. ‘Information only on a need-to-know basis, huh? Not so much James Bond as James Bone. A big fellow, wasn’t he? Look at the size of this cranium.’
Swift started to type.
‘And these enormous jaws. Only my wife has bigger jaws than these. But that’s just exercise rather than anything hereditary. Talking and eating, mainly. Wow, I’ve never seen teeth as big as this on a fossil. They’re much larger than a gorilla’s. And I should know. I still have the bite radius to prove it.’
‘How much larger, Byron?’
‘Maybe twice as large? Yeah. Why not? And look at these cranial crests. They’re very unusual. The occipital crest — now that’s smaller than a gorilla’s. However, the size of these teeth would seem to require extremely powerful masticatory muscles, in which case most of them would surely have to be attached to the top of the head, to the sagittal crest. And that would of course increase the height of the head. Quite a bit, come to think of it. Maybe one and a half times the height of a gorilla’s head, at the very least? This is really something quite extraordinary, isn’t it? You know, from the size and position of this occipital crest, one might almost assume that the owner of this skull kept its head rather more upright than a gorilla. That might even suggest bipedalism. An apelike creature that walked on two legs instead of a conventional knuckle-walker. I’m beginning to see the need for your legal acquaintance. Jesus, Swift. Where did you get this?’
‘At the moment, I can’t tell you that, Byron. All I can say is that this is not an Old World fossil.’
‘You surprise me. I was just about to suggest it might be australopithecine. Except of course no South African fossil primate was ever so large as this dude. Not even Paranthropus crassidens.’
Swift looked up from the screen of her laptop as Cody stopped speaking.
‘How about a Miocene ape?’ she suggested. ‘One of the ramapithecines, perhaps.’
‘Yes, that’s possible,’ he mused. ‘Gigantopithecus, maybe. The biggest primate ever known. Of course I’ve never seen an actual complete fossil. No one has. There are just those three teeth that von Koenigswald found in a Hong Kong drugstore. The so-called Dragon’s teeth. This could be Gigantopithecus. Goddammit, wouldn’t that be something?’
‘That was my first thought,’ she admitted. ‘But I wanted someone better qualified to come through the same line of reasoning.’
She started to underline some of the observations that Cody had made on her laptop’s screen.
‘The height of the head,’ she said. ‘You thought one point five as high as a gorilla’s.’
‘At least. Maybe fifteen centimetres above the ear. You know, I can imagine a scalp that might look something like a Viking’s helmet. Rather pointy-headed, same as a big silverback gorilla’s, only more so. Much more. And if this is consistent with what we already know about body-size dimorphism in primates and fossil primates, I should say what we have here was almost certainly a male of the species.’
Swift typed Male and then said:
‘Body-size dimorphism in primates is nearly always a corollary of males competing for access to a pool of females, right?’
‘Right. And also of polygamy.’ He weighed the cast in his hands and smiled broadly. ‘Yup. This lucky bastard probably had a whole harem of willing females.’
‘So that’s what turns you on, Byron. And here’s me thinking you were a happily monogamous man.’
‘Me, monogamous? Whatever gave you that idea? I should best describe my own sexuality as Neo-Confucian. Which is to say that I prefer the kind of heterosexual relationship where there exists a benevolent superior, namely myself, and an obedient subordinate to do my every bidding.’
‘Sounds like one of your gorillas,’ she remarked, laughing.
Cody grinned back at her through his patriarchal growth of facial hair. ‘The ape will out, I guess,’ he said. ‘But socially, you know? I think we have much more in common with baboons. The latest research shows that high-ranking females have their pick of the best males, although only at the price of an increased risk of miscarriage. There’s evidence of a similar effect among human females too. Successful career women often find it quite difficult to conceive.’
Wondering if she would ever have a child herself. Swift forced a smile.
‘But,’ she objected, ‘do we get to choose the best males?’
‘I don’t know about the best,’ said Cody. ‘But it has been my experience that a good-looking, intelligent, high-achieving woman like yourself can more or less get whatever the hell she wants.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Swift.
Cody shrugged and then smiled.
‘Signed your damn stupid paper, didn’t I?’
Sometimes it bothered Swift that she belonged to a university that had effectively built every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
A quarter of a century before Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson helped to establish Berkeley at the forefront of paleoanthropology, the university physics department at Le Conte Hall had already guaranteed Berkeley’s place in history when a team of scientists, including the distinguished Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence, met to discuss plans for a new type of bomb.
Lawrence had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for inventing the Cyclotron — a device for accelerating nuclear particles inside a circular magnetic field, a sort of nuclear pump. He had built his machine on a hill above the Berkeley campus, a site now occupied by the Lawrence Hall of Science. Experiments in the Cyclotron had resulted in the discovery of plutonium in 1941; since then, Berkeley scientists had developed other bombs and discovered thirteen other synthetic elements, including berkelium and californium, the antiproton, the antineutron, and Carbon-14.