Laminak, Neliska's sister, was happy at this decision. She had just gone through her rites of passage and so was, theoretically, eligible at the age of twelve for marriage. In practice, the young females did not marry until they were fourteen; some not until they were sixteen. Most of the early married did not bear children until they were eighteen or even older. This was not because of any method of birth control; the women did not become fertile until relatively late.
On the other hand, some of the tribes along the coast had many females who bore children at the age of twelve. The rate of death at childbirth was higher for both infant and mother in these tribes.
The two tribes walked eastward, encountering peoples who either fled or were easily awed by the display of Very lights or a few shots fired over their heads. No lives were lost on either side in these encounters, and after Gribardsun shot a rhinoceros or two or some wild cattle for the natives, a peaceful if sometimes uneasy relationship was established.
About the middle of January, the group arrived in what would be, someday, Tunisia. Actually, they were in an area that would be underwater off the Tunisian coast in the modern age, but the scientists made a number of treks from their base camp into the interior. Here the snows lay not too deeply on the winter grass and on top of the many trees. A broad river wound through the land and poured down into the Mediterranean. Gribardsun followed its course for two hundred miles before reluctantly turning back.
'I get the same joy from seeing the vast herds of many different types of animals and the great predators that feed on them as Robert does when he finds a new language,' he said to Rachel. 'This is the way a world should be. Few human beings, many animals, plenty of water and grass. I would like this even better if there were many more trees, but I know that these do exist further south. The air is pure, and nature works unhindered by man.'
'I long for the day when I can return home,' she said. 'But you sound as if you dread it.'
'Far from it,' he said. 'I look forward with joy to the day that the vessel returns.'
That was only one of the many puzzling statements he made. Rachel did not ask him what he meant. By now she knew that he just would not reply.
After a month and a half at their Tunisian camp, Gribardsun gave the word to march again. They set off toward Sicily. The stealing of water by the great northern glaciers had not only resulted in a land bridge across what would be the Straits of Gibraltar. There was another, and far greater, land bridge between Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, and part of Libya. The Mediterranean was, at this time, two smaller seas separated by the extension of Italy.
The tribes moved on the western coast of the bridge with the hills high on their right. And the sixth day out, Drummond found their first human fossil skull.
Apparently, though he was still living in the age of twelve, he had not forgotten everything he had learned since then. He was out walking near the camp, accompanied by Laminak and a juvenile male for protection, when he saw a piece of the skull sticking out of a layer of limestone halfway up a hill.
He told von Billmann of it. He would not speak to Rachel or John then - another indication that he was not entirely stuck at an early age. Robert verified the find and told the other two scientists. They spent a week delicately digging out the skull and some pieces of skeleton and looking for other fossils.
The study of the stratum and the bones, and the gaseous content and decay of the rocks, indicated that the skull belonged to a young man who had lived about 200,000 B.C., during the Third Glacial. His massive features indicated a human intermediate between Heidelberg and Neanderthal man. No tools were found in conjunction with the fossil.
The descendant of Homo heidelbergensis and the ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis was dubbed Homo Silverstein.
Though every member of the tribe was alerted to evidence of fossils, and some fossil animals and plants were found, no more human fossils were seen.
The land bridge was crossed and the safari was traveling on the west coast of Sicily, or, rather, on land that would be hundreds of feet below the twenty-first century Sicilian beaches. Occasionally, the scientists went to the mountains inland to make observations and collect specimens.
The next bridge was between Sicily and Italy. When they arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, they went up the river valley to the site of Rome-to-be. A small tribe of particularly brutish people lived there. They were short and squat and had skeletal characteristics which indicated a mixing with Neanderthals at some time in the past. They wore no clothes and daubed themselves with mud to keep themselves warm in the winter. Their weapons and tools were far too primitive for even 12,000 B.C., and they practiced cannibalism.
Farther north was another group which was a physical double of the pre-Romans. But these were far more advanced in technology and wore fur clothing skillfully sewn together and used fine stone, wood, and bone tools and weapons. Their language was related to that of the Tiber people.
Gribardsun had a theory that was, he admitted, mystical to some extent, and a modification of Jung's. He believed that each group of people had its own particular soul or collective psyche. The factors creating this soul were unconscious but deliberate. That is, the collective mind determined, in some as yet unanalyzable manner, to fashion itself into a mode belligerent or pacifist, lazy or busy, poetic or practical, progressive or static or regressive. Some collective souls yearned for a place by the gods; others, by swine.
The two groups they had just left were examples of the difference of collective psyches in two similar groups. Both had picked up some Neanderthal genes, and isolation from Homo sapiens had enabled them to retain these genes. It was possible that the two had only recently been one, and that the split had taken place only a few generations before. But one seemed to be deliberately brutish; the other, quite human.
'I don't think your colleagues at the University of Greater Europe would accept that theory,' von Billmann said.
'I do not care. It's only a theory, anyway, with no way to prove it, and I don't intend to waste time trying to do so,' Gribardsun said.
By early spring, they had entered that prong of land which took in the islands of Elba, Corsica, and Sardinia. These comprised one land mass connected with Italy and covered with firs and pines and filled with game, including elephants, cave bear and lions. Some of the tribes had Negroid skeletal traits, but they were definitely Caucasoid. Their hair was curly, but only loosely so, and their lips, though full, were not overly everted. There was a small minority of blonds among them.
By late April, the safari crossed the border-to-be between Italy and France. Gribardsun, having determined the border by astronomical and geodesic observations, was the first to walk across the imaginary line. Humming the Marseillaise, he strode along. His thick black hair was cut short straight across his forehead; the rest swinging shoulder-length. His face was shaven; he had not yet overcome his dislike of beards. He wore a yellow-brown lion-skin cape and a red deer loincloth and brown bearskin boots. The rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he carried a flint-tipped spear in one hand. His big steel hunting knife was in a sheath at his leopard-skin belt.
Behind him came Glamug, holding high at the end of a wooden pole a cave-bear skull. His face and body were painted with bright symbols, and he was chanting a protective ritual. Behind him came the chiefs and chief warriors of both tribes in their pecking order and then the Wota'shaimg. Behind them was the standard bearer of the Shluwg, holding on a pole a wildcat skull, and after him his tribe. The drummers and fluters and whistlers of both tribes were playing their own 'national' anthems, and their people were singing, respectively, the Song of the Father Bear and the Song of the Great Wildcat Mother. The only ones whose musical sensibilities were offended were the time travelers.