Up till now, the cooperation between Earth’s two dominant species could only be classified as an advanced symbiotic relationship. The ants provided medical services to the dinosaurs in exchange for food, and the dinosaurs traded food for medical care. Although the character of the transaction had evolved considerably since the ants had picked that first dinosaur’s teeth, the essence of the contract had remained unchanged.
In fact, this sort of mutualistic association between different species had long existed on Earth and persists to the present day. The practice is as old as the hills – older than most hills, actually. Consider, for example, the cleaning symbioses among marine organisms. Cleaner species rid certain fish of ectoparasites, fungi and algae, as well as damaged tissue and wayward scraps of food, and in the process they get to eat their fill. They assemble at fixed ‘cleaning stations’ to wait for client fish to swim by. Cleaners and clients establish ways of signalling to each other: for example, when a cleaner shrimp wants to approach a large fish, it will nudge it with its antennae. If the fish wishes to be cleaned, it will tilt its body, flare its gills and open its mouth to indicate its acceptance. Only then will the cleaner shrimp proceed; otherwise, it runs the risk of being eaten. Cleaning associations are extremely important to fish, and whenever a cleaner species is removed from an area, there’s a decline in both the health and abundance of the client fish species.
This type of symbiotic relationship has its limitations, however. The two symbionts come together solely for the purpose of exchanging the basic services necessary for survival. But the transition to civilisation requires symbionts to exchange something more profound, to engage in a higher level of cooperation, so that they might establish an alliance that is not merely symbiotic but co-evolutionary.
It was at this point in time that something happened in Boulder City to raise the dinosaur–ant alliance to new heights.
4
Tablets
Tablets were as vital to the dinosaur world as the paper on which we write. They came in two types: stationary and movable. Also called ‘wordhills’ or ‘wordstones’, stationary tablets (which we might also, rather pleasingly, term ‘dinosaur stationery’), were hills with a relatively even slope, gentle cliff faces or enormous rocks with smooth surfaces, on which the dinosaurs carved their super-sized words. Movable tablets could be made from many different materials, but wood, stone and leather were the most common. Because the dinosaurs did not yet use metal, let alone saws, they were unable to manufacture wooden boards; instead, they used their megalithic stone hatchets to cleave tree-trunks in two, lengthwise down the middle, and they then carved characters into the cross-section of one-half of them. Their stone tablets were flat slabs with facades soft enough for engraving; these came in all shapes and sizes, but the smallest would have been at least as big as one of our family dining-tables. Leather tablets were made from animal hides or lizard skins, and characters were drawn on them in plant- or mineral-based paint; often a single tablet required that many skins be joined together.
The dinosaurs’ thick, clumsy fingers made it impossible for them to grip small implements for carving or writing, and they lacked the dexterity needed to form small characters. As a result, the characters they produced were very large: the smallest they could manage were still the size of a football. This meant that their tablets were by necessity huge and unwieldy, and even then they could fit only a few characters on each one.
Tablets were usually held communally by a dinosaur tribe or settlement and were used to keep simple records of collective property, membership, economic output, and births and deaths. A tribe of 1,000 dinosaurs would need twenty to thirty sizeable trees for a register of its members, and the minutes from one meeting might require over a hundred hides. As a result, the manufacture of tablets placed a significant strain on the dinosaurs’ resources, and furthermore, when tribes or settlements relocated (a frequent occurrence during the Hunting Era), transporting libraries of tablets proved an even greater burden. For this reason, although dinosaur society had possessed a written language for 1,000 years, its cultural development was painfully slow and had nearly come to a standstill in recent centuries. Their script had remained extremely crude. With only simple, unary numerals and a handful of pictographs, it lagged far behind the sophistication of their spoken language. The sluggish emergence of writing had become the biggest obstacle to scientific and cultural progress in the dinosaur world, one which had arrested dinosaur society in a primitive state for a long time. It was a textbook example of how a species’ ill-shaped hands could hinder its evolution.
The dinosaur Kunda was one of a hundred or so scribes in Boulder City. In the dinosaur world, the job of a scribe fell somewhere between that of the modern-day occupations of typist and printer. Scribes were chiefly responsible for copying tablets by hand. On the day in question, Kunda and twenty other scribes were working in front of a mountain of tablets, making a copy of the register of Boulder City’s residents for safekeeping. Most of the original register had been recorded on wooden tablets. Hundreds of split tree-trunks were stacked in hill-height piles, giving Kunda’s workplace the appearance of one of our timber yards.
Kunda, a blunt stone knife gripped in his left claw and one of those humongous stone hammers in his right, was transcribing the pictograms from a ten-metre-long wooden tablet onto two new, shorter tablets. He had been at this dull, draining work for days and days, but still the inselberg of blank trunks in front of him didn’t seem to have got any smaller. Hurling down the stone knife and hammer, he rubbed his weary eyes, leant back against a stack of tablets and heaved a deep sigh, feeling very dispirited about his tedious life.
Just then, a squadron of 1,000 ants paraded past on the ground before him – on their way back from surgery, Kunda presumed. A sudden inspiration seized him. He stood up, picked out two dried strips of glow-lizard jerky and waved them at the colony. Glow-lizards were so called because they emitted a fluorescent light at night, and their meat was a favourite with ants. No surprise then that the ant squadron immediately changed its direction of travel and veered towards him.
Kunda pointed first to the tablet he was copying from, then to the one he was working on – which, depressingly, he’d so far inscribed with a mere two-and-a-half characters – and then to the ants. The ants grasped his meaning at once. They surged onto the smooth white face of the partially completed tablet and began to carve the remaining characters into the wood with their mandibles. Kunda, meanwhile, eased himself back against the stack of tablets, feeling rather smug. The ants would take much longer to finish the task than he would, but their patience and tenacity was immeasurably superior to that of any other creature and they would get it done eventually. In the meantime, he could kick back and relax for a spell.
He dozed off. In his dream he saw himself at the helm of a mighty army of more than a million ants, enthusiastically urging on his troops. The army swarmed over hundreds of blank tablets and like a black tide turned every one of them dark; before long, the tide withdrew, revealing a vast collection of tablets whose white surfaces now bore neat lines of orderly characters carved into them.
A series of slight pricks on Kunda’s lower leg roused him from sleep and when he raised his head he saw that several ants were gnawing at his left ankle. This was their customary way of getting a dinosaur’s attention. Seeing that he was awake, the ants gestured at the tablet with their antennae, to indicate the job was done. Kunda glanced up at the sun and realised that very little time had passed. He then looked at the tablet and promptly lost his temper. The ants had completed the half-written character at full size, but all the other characters they’d carved were many times smaller. It looked ridiculous – like a tiny tail trailing after the three large characters. Such shoddy work wasn’t just inadequate, it had ruined a whole tablet.