And if there was no one to see it hit, did it actually hit?
There is evidence, in the form of vast deposits of fat and gold (the great elephants that support the world do not have ordinary bones), deep underground in the Schmaltzberg mines. However, there is a more down-to-Disc theory: some catastrophe killed off millions of mammoths, bison and giant shrews, and then covered them over. On Roundworld, there would be a good scientific test to distinguish the two theories: are the deposits of fat shaped like a crash-landed elephant?
But there's no point even in looking, on Discworld, because narrative imperative will ensure that they are, even if they were formed by millions of mammoths, bison and giant shrews. Reality has to follow the legend.
Roundworld has so far reached only its third elephant, although Jack hopes that some careful selective breeding might yet bring back a fourth: the pygmy elephant, which lived in Malta and was about the size of a Shetland pony. It would make a marvellous pet -except that, like many diminutive creatures, it would probably be rather bad-tempered. And the very devil to discourage from getting on the settee.
We are a gracile ape (not that you'd notice in some parts of the world, where many of us more closely resemble a robust hippopotamus). About four million years ago one gracile lineage of apes started to get bigger brains and better tools. Against all the rules of taxonomy we call this lineage, our lineage, Homo: it really should be Pan, because we are the third chimpanzee. We use this name because it is certainly our own lineage, and we prefer to think of ourselves as being enormously different from the apes. In this we could be right: we may indeed share 98 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees, but then, we share 47 per cent with cabbages. Our big difference from the apes is cultural, not genetic. Anyway, within the Homo lineage we again find gracile and robust stocks. Homo habilis was our gracile tool-making ancestor, but Homo ergaster and others went the vegetarian, robust way. If there actually is a yeti or a bigfoot, the best bet is a robust Homo. From Homo habilis's success, a larger-brained Homo spread out over Africa, into Asia (as Peking Man) and Eastern Europe about 700 million years ago.
We have labelled one variety of these fossils Homo erectus. The visiting elf would certainly have noticed this fellow. He had several kinds of tools, and he used fire. He may even have possessed language, of a kind. What we have every reason to suspect that he did, that his ancestors and cousins only occasionally achieved, was to 'understand' his world and change it. Chimpanzees engage in quite a lot of 'if ... then' activities, including lying: 'if I pretend not to have seen that banana, I can come back and get it later when that big male won't steal it from me'.
The young of this early hominid grew up in family groups where things were happening that were unlike anything anywhere else on the planet. Sure, there were lots of other mammal nests, packs and troupes, where the young were playing at being adult or just fooling around; nests were safe, and trial-and-error was rarely lethal, so the young could learn safely. But in the human lineage, father was making stone tools, grunting at his women about the children, about the cave, about putting more wood on the fire. There would be favourite gourds for banging, perhaps for fetching water, spears for hunting, lots of stones for tools.
Meanwhile, in Africa, another new lineage had arisen about 120,000 years ago, and spread; we call it ancient Homo sapiens, and it led to us. Its brain was even bigger, and in caves on the coast of South Africa it -we -had begun to make better tools, and to make primitive paintings on rocks and cave walls. Our population exploded, and we migrated. We reached Australia just over
60,000 years ago, and Europe about 50,000 years ago.
In Europe there had been a moderately robust Homo, the Neanderthal Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies. Some anthropologists consider us to be a sister subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens or, loosely speaking, 'Seriously wise man'. Wow. The Neanderthals' stone tools were well developed for various functions, but these particular hominids seem not to have been progressive. Their culture hardly changed over tens of thousands of years. But they seem to have had some kind of spiritual impulse, for they buried their dead with ceremony -or, at least, with flowers.
Our more gracile ancestors, the Cro-Magnon people, lived at the same time as the last of the Neanderthals, and there are many theories about what happened when the two subspecies interacted. Basically, we survived and the Neanderthals didn't ...
Why? Was it because we bashed them on the head more effectively than they bashed us? Did we outbreed them? Inbreed them? Squeeze them out into the 'edge country'? Crush them with superior extelligence? We'll put our own theory forward later in the book.
We don't subscribe to the 'rational' story of human evolution and development, the story that has named us so pretentiously Homo sapiens sapiens. Briefly, that story focuses on the nerve cells in our brains, and says that our brains got bigger and bigger until finally we evolved Albert Einstein. They did, and we did, and Albert was indeed pretty bright, but nonetheless the thrust of that story is nonsense, because it doesn't discuss why, or even how, our brains got bigger. It's like describing a cathedral by saying 'You start with a low wall of stones and as time passes you add more stones so that it gets higher and higher'. There's a lot more to a cathedral than that, as its builders would attest.
What actually happened is much more interesting, and you can see it going on all around you today. Let's look at it from the elf's viewpoint. We don't programme our children rationally, as we might set up a computer. Instead, we pour into their minds loads of irrational junk about sly foxes, wise owls, heroes and princes, magicians and genies, gods and demons, and bears that get stuck in rabbit-holes; we frighten them half to death with tales of terror, and they come to enjoy the fear. We beat them (not very much in the last few decades, but for thousands of years before that, for sure). We embed the teaching messages in long sagas, in priestly injunctions, and invented histories full of dramatic lessons; in children's stories that teach them by indirection.
Stand near a children's playground, and watch (these days, check with the local police station first, and in any case be sure to wear protective clothing). Peter and Iona Opie did just that, many years ago, and collected children's songs and games, some of them thousands of years old.
Culture passes through the whirlpool that is the child community without needing adults for its transmission: you will all remember Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Mo, or some other counting-out ritual.
There is a children's subculture that propagates itself without adult intervention, censorship, or indeed knowledge.
The Opies later collected, and began to explain to adults, the original nursery stories like Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin. In late medieval times, Cinderella's slipper had been a fur one, not glass. And that was a euphemism, because (at least in the German version) the girls gave the prince their 'fur slipper' to try on ... The story came to us through the French, and in that language
'verre' can either be 'glass' or 'fur'. The Grimm brothers went for the hygienic alternative, saving parents the danger of embarrassing explanations.
Rumpelstiltskin was an interestingly sexual parable, too, a tale to programme the idea that female masturbation leads to sterility. Remember the tale? The miller's daughter, put in the barn to 'spin straw into gold', virginally sits on a little stick that becomes a little man ... The denouement has the little man, when his name is finally identified, jumping in to 'plug' the lady very intimately, and the assembled soldiers can't pull him out. In the modern bowdlerised version, this survives vestigially as the little man pushing his foot through the floor and not being able to pull it out, a total non sequitur. So none of those concerned, king, miller or queen, can procreate (the stolen first child has been killed by the soldiers), and it all ends in tears. If you doubt this interpretation, enjoy the indirection: 'What is his name? What is his name?' recurs in the story. What is his name? What is a stilt with a rumpled skin? Whoops. The name has an equivalent derivation in many languages, too. (In Discworld, Nanny Ogg claimed to have written a children's story called