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Unnatural Selection
Aquitain Basin, Southwest France, 32,000 years ago.
He was hunting. Moving with innate quietness, the big man blended seamlessly with the natural rhythms of the nocturnal forest. A sharp bark, more of a cough, disturbed the still night air off on his left. He froze instinctively, predatory eyes scanning the unspoiled darkness. Answering cries, borne by spine-tingling mournfulness, howled distantly in the east behind him. The paused hunter allowed himself a rare smile of satisfaction. Oddly separated from its littermates, his anxious quarry would be striving to rejoin its pack. Reluctant to climb alone the steep, crumbly cliffs the man had painstakingly worked his way down from the ridgeline in the daylight hours so as to get ahead of his sleeping prey, his quarry would make its way down the readily traversable valley floor.
His quarry was coming to him.
He hunkered down to wait, his broad back propped against the mossy trunk of a chestnut, the gurgle of the nearby stream loud to his straining ears. Relaxed as he appeared, his nerves were taut, his senses heightened. A hunter on the trail of dangerous foe, he appreciated that carelessness led to injury, likely death.
That he was human was indisputable: the bipedal stance, the dextrously fingered hands, the intelligent stare from forward facing eyes, all pointed to apish origins. Evolved from hominin progenitors cradled in the scorched crib of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania two million years earlier, his immediate ancestors sprang from the loins of journeyers migrating from North Africa into the Middle East, spreading from there throughout Eurasia. Those had been hotter, drier, and dustier days. In these equally harsh times the climate was cooler but comparably arid, the water locked in frozen sheets a mile thick scouring the globe.
This was an intensely cold glacial cycle. Earth shuddered in the chill grip of an ice age.
His breath misted before him; a silvery cloud against the black backdrop. Less than 500 miles to the north the great ice cap crushed the land, brutalizing the topography of what would eventually become Scandinavia; Denmark, Norway, Sweden, even Finland, lay entombed in permanent ice. The exhalations of that frozen clench reached far into the southern latitudes where flora and fauna – humans included – clung precariously to life, eking out fragile existences in the narrow belt of woodland stretching from coastal France eastwards through future Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, and into the Russian interior. Summers were misleadingly brief, chilled by icy winds blowing off the tundra where present-day Southern England and the Netherlands cowered beneath the ice overcoat.
The hunter’s fur wrap took the nip off the night air. Rabbit, hare, and fox skins, overlapped and rudely bound together with animal sinews, the pelts turned inside out so the insulating hairs brushed warmly against his own hairy skin, made for a wearable cloak and leggings both warming and waterproof. Similarly fashioned beaver-skinned moccasins served to protect his feet from numbing frostbite, but here, in the late summer forest, he walked barefoot; the squelch of mosses and lichens beneath his soles, the soothing feel of loam between his toes, combined to make the elderly hunter come alive, feel the vigour of lost youth again.
By modern standards he would not be considered old. If his kind counted years he was in his late thirties. But the unavoidable harshness of a Stone Age lifestyle exacted a heavy physical toll on those peopling his clan. Many of the children did not reach their teens. The women usually lived longest; few men were lucky enough to attain the age of a buck elk. So his ten-strong family group considered him freakishly geriatric. It was extremely unlikely he would live much longer. In the cold, hard light of an ice age day the majority of adult Neanderthals failed to see their fortieth year of life. The odds were stacked against him.
Snuffling sounded from up the valley, making him tenser. Eyes hooded by prominent brow ridges danced with anticipation. He sniffed the dark air, the faint pungency of wet fur flaring his splayed nostrils. Shaped by evolution to principally warm the glacial air entering the lungs, and conversely lose the body heat generated by exertion without the disadvantage of excess sweat freezing on the skin, his broad nose bestowed a better ability to scent than his forebears enjoyed.
He smelt wolf!
His burly hands gripped firmer the shaft of the massive spear resting across his lap. Beautifully adapted to polar conditions, his squat and compact body ensured minimal heat loss to the freezing environs. But the thick-boned, amply muscled frame came at a price. In order to fuel their brawn Neanderthals out of necessity became chiefly meat-eaters. High in protein, rich in energy, the flesh of ibex, bison, and horse also powered Neanderthal intellect, for their hungry brains were larger than those of modern humans.
And they put that brainpower to good use. Over the years they were taught, and learnt from the trial and error of experience, extraordinary survival skills. The well-being of the clan depended on memorising terrain features, weather patterns, prey migrations and habits. If you did not understand the land, respect the land, then the land would end you and return your body to nourish the thin soil topping the permafrost. There was no malice, no mercy. The land could slay you just as easily as sustain you.
Of course, Neanderthals rationalized differently from you and me. Spared the sophistication of urban life, the simpler world they populated had fewer complexities yet was far more taxing. They did not think of personal comfort beyond a full belly, warm fire, and an agreeable mate to gratify lustful urges: the daily pressure of gathering food in this arduous landscape discouraged activities not directly related to survival. Precious time and effort could not be misspent on the unproductive pursuits of music and art. It was a cultural inhibition, a reluctance to relax the tribal mindset that would bring about their evolutionary downfall.
But the elderly hunter was someone special, a freak of nature like the aberration he stalked.
Christened Hawg at birth, his name held no meaning other than the sound he responded to when addressed. His people conversed in a simple language unembellished by superfluous grammar: another expression of Neanderthal frugality. Economy ruled a society where extravagance squandered energy that could ill afford to be wasted.
Hawg was the exception to that rule. His neurons fired haphazardly in different sequences to the rigid thought processes limiting his brothers and sisters, expanding his consciousness. He was a thinker! After reaching manhood at age fifteen, Hawg’s altered perception of the world mutated exponentially; the older he got, the more complex his thinking became. Cursed with a questioning mind, he secretly pondered the mysteries of the natural world. Why did water fall from cloudy, not clear skies? What made the sun rise and set? Did those same unseen forces drive the regularity of the seasons? Such cogitation should have led to stirrings of spirituality. But Hawg could not entirely escape Neanderthal pragmatism and so pulled back from contemplating the greatest enigma of all: the meaning of life.
Thinking outside the box, even if boxes were not yet invented, was outlandish in this bygone day and age. Lacking the vocabulary to express his contemplations did not prevent the tribe from judging Hawg. They sensed his inexplicable strangeness, fearing it. The women threw him sidelong glances and did not encourage him to take a mate. Only his undeniable prowess as a provider for the clan kept them from driving him out. Such radical freethinking moulded him into the loner that periodically undertook forays into the valley unaccompanied; the same reckless impulse that drew him to stake out this clearing tonight. Tracking this game neither for food nor furs, Hawg was hunting not out of necessity but prejudice.
The snuffles grew louder, enticingly closer. Hawg’s lushly bearded face stayed intent, despite the distraction of physical discomfort. Arthritis pained his joints, aching especially hard where he had dislocated a shoulder and fractured finger bones over the course of his punishing life spent tackling game of all sizes.
Common sense had thus far prevented him incurring serious hunting injuries, although his scarred body remained a map of the numerous bumps, sprains, and falls weathered over the years. He stuck sensibly to the hunter’s ploy: target the old, the weak, the young, and the incautious. In doing so you culled the undesirables and built up the strength of the herd, so that your prey animals flourished and provided the tribe with continued sustenance. Only the fittest, ablest animals survived to reproduce. The earliest example of selective breeding by humankind, this was a prelude to domestication.
Such was not the case tonight. Hawg sought to eradicate, not perpetuate. The prey he chased, juvenile and scared as it was, would happily feast on his flesh if he did not keep his wits about him. Underestimating a cornered animal was tantamount to suicide, a concept as alien to Neanderthals as the gibbous moon cresting the treetops. Why kill oneself after hard years of struggling to stay alive in the harshest living environment imaginable?
Coming up into a crouch, Hawg bunched his cramping muscles. Concealed by bracken and shadows, he eyeballed the canine form loping along the shrubby floor of the broad valley. Every few paces it would stop, scenting the air warily before padding forward with furtive steps, then repeating the procedure. There was tension in its doglike body that bespoke of caution warring with haste.
Hawg waited with the patience of a blooded hunter, a fresh breeze unsettling the forest. Disadvantageously positioned upwind, the wolf would not unmask him. His mind inadvertently wandered to thoughts of home: the cost of possessing an abnormal, overactive intellect, he often daydreamed at inopportune moments. The old man dreamily imagined his seaside home. For thirteen generations Neanderthals habitually occupied that cliffside cave, carved by the sculpting waves before the freezing of the oceans dropped sea levels hundreds of feet worldwide. Stone hearths warmed and lit the otherwise dank and dark grotto stinking of excrement and seaweed. Long a shelter against weather and wild beasts, the cave of late had turned into a final refuge.
For two and a half million years humans, in some form or another, thrived in the Dordogne Valley. Abundant in game, its limestone cliffs cut by ancient rivers and pockmarked with liveable caverns and overhangs, the region stayed prime prehistoric real estate. Therein lay the problem. For the last 10,000 years the Neanderthals shared their patch with slimmer, savvier neighbours who inexorably muscled in on valuable territories, shrinking the range of the longstanding residents. Already forced westwards to the bottom end of France, the competition was pressuring them even further south into Spain. The Neanderthals were slowly but steadily being pushed right out of Europe!
Dimly aware of the problem, it remained beyond Hawg’s control to counter. His ancestors had already taken the only recourse open to them by relocating to the coast. He pictured the industrious womenfolk gathering and shucking mussels on the seashore, his fellow hunters spearing seals out on the drifting pack ice. Regular excursions to the interior used to reap welcome supplements of reindeer steaks and slabs of mammoth meat. Recently, the forest pickings had grown exceedingly slim, amounting to a few skittish hares. Having claimed the best hunting grounds, the interlopers were picking them clean. But the frozen Atlantic grudgingly fed Hawg’s people, mitigating the deprivations the encroachment imposed.
Centering on the clarity a working hunter needed, he focused his stray thoughts back on to his quarry. Stopped in its tracks by an untoward sound, or maybe just its nose for trouble, the lupine pawed the air indecisively then sat dejectedly on its haunches, looking forlorn if one applied human emotions to an animal. Hawg saw only his opportunity to pounce.
Erupting from concealment, spear extended rigidly at groin height, Hawg’s mute charge utterly startled his prey. Yelping in fright, the wolf crouched, baring yellow teeth defiantly at the oncoming human. Exclusively a stabbing rather than a throwing weapon, Hawg thrust his hefty lance at the grimacing canine, aiming to skewer its shoulder. His speed dulled by age, the oldster’s lunge was timed a fraction slow, allowing the wolf time to dodge impalement.
Jumping upright, balanced assuredly on its hind legs, stumpy tail twitching excitedly, the twisting wolf swatted the shaft aside with a cupped forepaw, jaws snapping eagerly at the overreached human stumbling past. Dropping his spear as gnashing teeth savaged his upper arm, Hawg threw off the snarling wolf and spun around, the tables dangerously turned.
Spared a graver mauling thanks to his thick wrap of pelts, sticky warmness trickled down Hawg’s slashed deltoid muscle, matting the fur lining: the wolf had drawn first blood. Facing each other on equal footing, two-legged and fighting solely with tooth and nail, the antagonists glowered at one another. Disassociating from the stinging bite, Hawg did not bother taking stock of his foe baying futilely for its faraway pack. He had gutted and skinned enough of its ilk that its form held no surprises, other than the three pairs of dugs marking her as female and not the males he commonly butchered.
Shorter and leaner than any Neanderthal when standing tall, she remained unmistakably canine in profile, but sporting subtle deviations. The ultimate experimenter, evolution tirelessly tinkered with animal and plant species, discarding the flawed with ruthless detachment while enhancing the prosperous. Replying to Man’s emergence, wolves unthinkingly fought fire with fire, aping the simian body gait and doubling feral wiliness. Four digit paws crudely mimicked primate hands but lacked the dexterity a true opposable thumb granted: a deficiency that thus far precluded tool usage on their part. Rudimentary pack signals were not progressing beyond recognition and response calls. Given time that might change as the syntax of true speech surfaced alongside increased intelligence. Developmentally they had a long way to go to catch up with the advanced apes, but the new and improved type of wolf was on track to becoming a higher lifeform.
And that embryonic prospect roused Hawg’s bloodlust, giving him the impetus to methodically hunt them down whenever the opportunity arose, expending energy on exterminating a species with no clear-cut gain but the grim certainty of seeing them die. On a subconscious level he perceived the latent super-wolves as a budding threat that must not be allowed to flower. And so he acted on his compulsion.
Hawg searched for his fallen spear, spied it lying at the feet of the growling wolf. Eight feet in length, it unashamedly looked a conservative weapon. When fashioning it, he discarded fitting the usual flint spearhead, reverting to the age-old method of fire-hardening a sharpened tip. This created a more efficient point for repeated stabbing crucial for a thrusting spear; the smoother tip would not snag on bone. But in doing so Hawg clung to the worn path of tradition his people trudged blindly down.
Weaponless but unfazed, he bent his primed body and spread his arms wide, intent on grappling his prey into submission. The wolf imitated his stance, her muzzle wrinkling in scorn and hatred.
Nowhere near human, but more than mere animal, her kind possessed on adaptive cunning bordering on sapience. Unlike Hawg, her pack collectively sensed when the rhythms of the natural world were imbalanced, and they recognised that Man caused the upheaval. There was a subtle shift of power in the natural order of things; the first trickle of loose stones preceding a major avalanche. Imbued with the latent faculty to shape his environment to his own wants and needs, Man was losing his innocence and destined to become a ferocious destroyer.
No match for the rising humans and fewer in number, the evolving wolves formed into packs of thirty, finding safety in numbers. Benefiting from the amazing climbing abilities toughened claws and suppler paws conferred, the daring bobtailed lupines took to scaling the chalk heights to snatch the cubs of their select enemy. Mindful in their deep-seated awareness that men posed a terrible threat severer than any cave bear or lion, they were responding to a more basic urge. The need to feed compelled them to regard the creature responsible for depleting their natural prey as an alternative food source. Attacking wholly under the shield of darkness, they engendered a reputation as monsters of the moonlit night, rising up on two legs to devour human pups, ripping out the seeds before they took root.
She leaped for Hawg jaws agape, forearms held stiffly behind her back. Stepping confidently into the wolf’s pounce, he seized her neck with a meaty hand and ducked behind her scrabbling claws, locking his elbow about her furry throat. Linking hands and exerting tremendous pressure, Hawg started choking the life from the outwitted she-wolf.
Canid behaviour made it simple for him to regain the upper hand. Contrary to how cats attack using clawed paws to trip and grasp prey, controlling quarry before delivering the killing neck bite, dogs lead only with the muzzle: a mouthful of sharp teeth subdued a bucking prey animal better than blunt nails. Spared having to avoid swiping paws permitted Hawg to concentrate of nullifying those chompers.
Fighting hard for her life, she thrashed about in the man’s unrelenting grip. Reacting like a constrictor he tightened his stranglehold. She whined piteously and, steadily deprived of air, ceased writhing. Unmoved, the powerful hunter squeezed harder and crushed her windpipe, dropping the carcass to the loamy forest floor.
Pain lanced through Hawg’s side, stealing his breath and chance to gloat over another triumph. Glancing down to see what agonized him, he was puzzling over the quivering wooden spear embedded in his hip when he got knocked on his backside by a second javelin thudding into his chest. Keeling over, lying bewildered and gasping on his uninjured side, Hawg witnessed a lanky giant garbed in coarse bearskins stride brazenly into the clearing, hefting another of those lightweight throwing spears over his shoulder as he approached the stricken Neanderthal. His sparsely bearded face impassive, only the newcomer’s startling blue eyes showed emotion - creepy, unadulterated pleasure.
His evident humanness spotlighted the fact that he was not clan. Comparatively new kids on the block, the Cro-Magnons were taking the prehistoric world by storm. Innovative, artistic, nomadic – Hawg’s cousins unlocked, and would exceed, the potential thus far unrealized by humankind. Center stage for so long, Neanderthal Man would soon take his final curtain call and bow out forever.
Distracted by the spear protruding killingly from his chest, Hawg compared the weapon with its user; willowy, even fragilely built, both projected a sense of unfussy deadliness.
The fleeting lucidness fatality bestows opened Hawg’s dimming sight to the glaring obvious; he had misspent his woefully short lifespan targeting the wrong competitor. All along the direr threat had been his brother man, not the precursor of the dog.
As he died, thoughts endlessly churning inside a brain refusing to accept the empty finality of death, Hawg belatedly realized nobody would scrape out a shallow grave in which to bury him, or ritually arrange prized possessions beside his corpse placed in the fetal position. Perhaps the Neanderthals showed the promise of religious sentiment after all.
Stooping, his shell necklace rattling, Nalla examined the speared Neanderthal. Glancing at the strangled wolf alongside, he viewed them jointly as rival predators deserving to be slain out of hand. Where his fellow hunters concentrated on repulsing the predation of the climbing wolves, Nalla hunted Neanderthals purely for sport; it was impersonal, unprejudiced. He simply regarded his cousins as the ultimate prey; bastardized men armed similarly to him with flint and guile.
Nalla conceitedly deemed himself fully human, racially pure. Anatomically nigh on identical to us, if you bathed him, shaved him, dressed him in a business suit, he would not look out of place on Wall Street. Mentally, he reasoned just as psychotically as modern man, plagued with the hang-ups of a mind undergoing unrestrained enlargement: think of an egg shell crazing and the yolk oozing out between the hairline cracks. Finding an outlet for his neuroses, Nalla held the unrecorded notoriety of emergent humanity’s first serial killer: for him the thrill of the hunt transmuted into the empowering joy of killing.
Dragging the limp wolf by the back legs, he draped the carcass over his shoulders and stood, grunting from lifting the additional weight. Meagre as the meat yield of Hawg’s pilfered kill was, the Ice Age credo Waste not, want not persisted. Savoring the looseness of tribal polygamy, Nalla intended gifting the pelt to his next female conquest in return for sexual favours. Prostitution was indeed the world’s oldest profession!
Moonlight beamed into the arena and Nalla spared the night-sun a passing look in between yanking spears out of his victim’s body. Finished retrieving his weapons, he marched from the clearing, callously leaving Hawg for the scavengers. Strident baying farther up the valley elicited answering howls; ghostly echoes fading into distant time. An evolutional dead end, the super-wolves inability to adapt faster than primitive man marked them an experiment doomed to fail. Fated, like the original cave men, to be gone but not forgotten.
Retaining a core memory of the persecuting lupines, future pre-industrial humans would forever associate the vanished wolves-that-walked-like-men with the moon, birthing the legend of the werewolf.
He was hunting. Moving with innate quietness, the big man blended seamlessly with the natural rhythms of the nocturnal forest. A sharp bark, more of a cough, disturbed the still night air off on his left. He froze instinctively, predatory eyes scanning the unspoiled darkness. Answering cries, borne by spine-tingling mournfulness, howled distantly in the east behind him. The paused hunter allowed himself a rare smile of satisfaction. Oddly separated from its littermates, his anxious quarry would be striving to rejoin its pack. Reluctant to climb alone the steep, crumbly cliffs the man had painstakingly worked his way down from the ridgeline in the daylight hours so as to get ahead of his sleeping prey, his quarry would make its way down the readily traversable valley floor.
His quarry was coming to him.
He hunkered down to wait, his broad back propped against the mossy trunk of a chestnut, the gurgle of the nearby stream loud to his straining ears. Relaxed as he appeared, his nerves were taut, his senses heightened. A hunter on the trail of dangerous foe, he appreciated that carelessness led to injury, likely death.
That he was human was indisputable: the bipedal stance, the dextrously fingered hands, the intelligent stare from forward facing eyes, all pointed to apish origins. Evolved from hominin progenitors cradled in the scorched crib of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania two million years earlier, his immediate ancestors sprang from the loins of journeyers migrating from North Africa into the Middle East, spreading from there throughout Eurasia. Those had been hotter, drier, and dustier days. In these equally harsh times the climate was cooler but comparably arid, the water locked in frozen sheets a mile thick scouring the globe.
This was an intensely cold glacial cycle. Earth shuddered in the chill grip of an ice age.
His breath misted before him; a silvery cloud against the black backdrop. Less than 500 miles to the north the great ice cap crushed the land, brutalizing the topography of what would eventually become Scandinavia; Denmark, Norway, Sweden, even Finland, lay entombed in permanent ice. The exhalations of that frozen clench reached far into the southern latitudes where flora and fauna – humans included – clung precariously to life, eking out fragile existences in the narrow belt of woodland stretching from coastal France eastwards through future Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, and into the Russian interior. Summers were misleadingly brief, chilled by icy winds blowing off the tundra where present-day Southern England and the Netherlands cowered beneath the ice overcoat.
The hunter’s fur wrap took the nip off the night air. Rabbit, hare, and fox skins, overlapped and rudely bound together with animal sinews, the pelts turned inside out so the insulating hairs brushed warmly against his own hairy skin, made for a wearable cloak and leggings both warming and waterproof. Similarly fashioned beaver-skinned moccasins served to protect his feet from numbing frostbite, but here, in the late summer forest, he walked barefoot; the squelch of mosses and lichens beneath his soles, the soothing feel of loam between his toes, combined to make the elderly hunter come alive, feel the vigour of lost youth again.
By modern standards he would not be considered old. If his kind counted years he was in his late thirties. But the unavoidable harshness of a Stone Age lifestyle exacted a heavy physical toll on those peopling his clan. Many of the children did not reach their teens. The women usually lived longest; few men were lucky enough to attain the age of a buck elk. So his ten-strong family group considered him freakishly geriatric. It was extremely unlikely he would live much longer. In the cold, hard light of an ice age day the majority of adult Neanderthals failed to see their fortieth year of life. The odds were stacked against him.
Snuffling sounded from up the valley, making him tenser. Eyes hooded by prominent brow ridges danced with anticipation. He sniffed the dark air, the faint pungency of wet fur flaring his splayed nostrils. Shaped by evolution to principally warm the glacial air entering the lungs, and conversely lose the body heat generated by exertion without the disadvantage of excess sweat freezing on the skin, his broad nose bestowed a better ability to scent than his forebears enjoyed.
He smelt wolf!
His burly hands gripped firmer the shaft of the massive spear resting across his lap. Beautifully adapted to polar conditions, his squat and compact body ensured minimal heat loss to the freezing environs. But the thick-boned, amply muscled frame came at a price. In order to fuel their brawn Neanderthals out of necessity became chiefly meat-eaters. High in protein, rich in energy, the flesh of ibex, bison, and horse also powered Neanderthal intellect, for their hungry brains were larger than those of modern humans.
And they put that brainpower to good use. Over the years they were taught, and learnt from the trial and error of experience, extraordinary survival skills. The well-being of the clan depended on memorising terrain features, weather patterns, prey migrations and habits. If you did not understand the land, respect the land, then the land would end you and return your body to nourish the thin soil topping the permafrost. There was no malice, no mercy. The land could slay you just as easily as sustain you.
Of course, Neanderthals rationalized differently from you and me. Spared the sophistication of urban life, the simpler world they populated had fewer complexities yet was far more taxing. They did not think of personal comfort beyond a full belly, warm fire, and an agreeable mate to gratify lustful urges: the daily pressure of gathering food in this arduous landscape discouraged activities not directly related to survival. Precious time and effort could not be misspent on the unproductive pursuits of music and art. It was a cultural inhibition, a reluctance to relax the tribal mindset that would bring about their evolutionary downfall.
But the elderly hunter was someone special, a freak of nature like the aberration he stalked.
Christened Hawg at birth, his name held no meaning other than the sound he responded to when addressed. His people conversed in a simple language unembellished by superfluous grammar: another expression of Neanderthal frugality. Economy ruled a society where extravagance squandered energy that could ill afford to be wasted.
Hawg was the exception to that rule. His neurons fired haphazardly in different sequences to the rigid thought processes limiting his brothers and sisters, expanding his consciousness. He was a thinker! After reaching manhood at age fifteen, Hawg’s altered perception of the world mutated exponentially; the older he got, the more complex his thinking became. Cursed with a questioning mind, he secretly pondered the mysteries of the natural world. Why did water fall from cloudy, not clear skies? What made the sun rise and set? Did those same unseen forces drive the regularity of the seasons? Such cogitation should have led to stirrings of spirituality. But Hawg could not entirely escape Neanderthal pragmatism and so pulled back from contemplating the greatest enigma of all: the meaning of life.
Thinking outside the box, even if boxes were not yet invented, was outlandish in this bygone day and age. Lacking the vocabulary to express his contemplations did not prevent the tribe from judging Hawg. They sensed his inexplicable strangeness, fearing it. The women threw him sidelong glances and did not encourage him to take a mate. Only his undeniable prowess as a provider for the clan kept them from driving him out. Such radical freethinking moulded him into the loner that periodically undertook forays into the valley unaccompanied; the same reckless impulse that drew him to stake out this clearing tonight. Tracking this game neither for food nor furs, Hawg was hunting not out of necessity but prejudice.
The snuffles grew louder, enticingly closer. Hawg’s lushly bearded face stayed intent, despite the distraction of physical discomfort. Arthritis pained his joints, aching especially hard where he had dislocated a shoulder and fractured finger bones over the course of his punishing life spent tackling game of all sizes.
Common sense had thus far prevented him incurring serious hunting injuries, although his scarred body remained a map of the numerous bumps, sprains, and falls weathered over the years. He stuck sensibly to the hunter’s ploy: target the old, the weak, the young, and the incautious. In doing so you culled the undesirables and built up the strength of the herd, so that your prey animals flourished and provided the tribe with continued sustenance. Only the fittest, ablest animals survived to reproduce. The earliest example of selective breeding by humankind, this was a prelude to domestication.
Such was not the case tonight. Hawg sought to eradicate, not perpetuate. The prey he chased, juvenile and scared as it was, would happily feast on his flesh if he did not keep his wits about him. Underestimating a cornered animal was tantamount to suicide, a concept as alien to Neanderthals as the gibbous moon cresting the treetops. Why kill oneself after hard years of struggling to stay alive in the harshest living environment imaginable?
Coming up into a crouch, Hawg bunched his cramping muscles. Concealed by bracken and shadows, he eyeballed the canine form loping along the shrubby floor of the broad valley. Every few paces it would stop, scenting the air warily before padding forward with furtive steps, then repeating the procedure. There was tension in its doglike body that bespoke of caution warring with haste.
Hawg waited with the patience of a blooded hunter, a fresh breeze unsettling the forest. Disadvantageously positioned upwind, the wolf would not unmask him. His mind inadvertently wandered to thoughts of home: the cost of possessing an abnormal, overactive intellect, he often daydreamed at inopportune moments. The old man dreamily imagined his seaside home. For thirteen generations Neanderthals habitually occupied that cliffside cave, carved by the sculpting waves before the freezing of the oceans dropped sea levels hundreds of feet worldwide. Stone hearths warmed and lit the otherwise dank and dark grotto stinking of excrement and seaweed. Long a shelter against weather and wild beasts, the cave of late had turned into a final refuge.
For two and a half million years humans, in some form or another, thrived in the Dordogne Valley. Abundant in game, its limestone cliffs cut by ancient rivers and pockmarked with liveable caverns and overhangs, the region stayed prime prehistoric real estate. Therein lay the problem. For the last 10,000 years the Neanderthals shared their patch with slimmer, savvier neighbours who inexorably muscled in on valuable territories, shrinking the range of the longstanding residents. Already forced westwards to the bottom end of France, the competition was pressuring them even further south into Spain. The Neanderthals were slowly but steadily being pushed right out of Europe!
Dimly aware of the problem, it remained beyond Hawg’s control to counter. His ancestors had already taken the only recourse open to them by relocating to the coast. He pictured the industrious womenfolk gathering and shucking mussels on the seashore, his fellow hunters spearing seals out on the drifting pack ice. Regular excursions to the interior used to reap welcome supplements of reindeer steaks and slabs of mammoth meat. Recently, the forest pickings had grown exceedingly slim, amounting to a few skittish hares. Having claimed the best hunting grounds, the interlopers were picking them clean. But the frozen Atlantic grudgingly fed Hawg’s people, mitigating the deprivations the encroachment imposed.
Centering on the clarity a working hunter needed, he focused his stray thoughts back on to his quarry. Stopped in its tracks by an untoward sound, or maybe just its nose for trouble, the lupine pawed the air indecisively then sat dejectedly on its haunches, looking forlorn if one applied human emotions to an animal. Hawg saw only his opportunity to pounce.
Erupting from concealment, spear extended rigidly at groin height, Hawg’s mute charge utterly startled his prey. Yelping in fright, the wolf crouched, baring yellow teeth defiantly at the oncoming human. Exclusively a stabbing rather than a throwing weapon, Hawg thrust his hefty lance at the grimacing canine, aiming to skewer its shoulder. His speed dulled by age, the oldster’s lunge was timed a fraction slow, allowing the wolf time to dodge impalement.
Jumping upright, balanced assuredly on its hind legs, stumpy tail twitching excitedly, the twisting wolf swatted the shaft aside with a cupped forepaw, jaws snapping eagerly at the overreached human stumbling past. Dropping his spear as gnashing teeth savaged his upper arm, Hawg threw off the snarling wolf and spun around, the tables dangerously turned.
Spared a graver mauling thanks to his thick wrap of pelts, sticky warmness trickled down Hawg’s slashed deltoid muscle, matting the fur lining: the wolf had drawn first blood. Facing each other on equal footing, two-legged and fighting solely with tooth and nail, the antagonists glowered at one another. Disassociating from the stinging bite, Hawg did not bother taking stock of his foe baying futilely for its faraway pack. He had gutted and skinned enough of its ilk that its form held no surprises, other than the three pairs of dugs marking her as female and not the males he commonly butchered.
Shorter and leaner than any Neanderthal when standing tall, she remained unmistakably canine in profile, but sporting subtle deviations. The ultimate experimenter, evolution tirelessly tinkered with animal and plant species, discarding the flawed with ruthless detachment while enhancing the prosperous. Replying to Man’s emergence, wolves unthinkingly fought fire with fire, aping the simian body gait and doubling feral wiliness. Four digit paws crudely mimicked primate hands but lacked the dexterity a true opposable thumb granted: a deficiency that thus far precluded tool usage on their part. Rudimentary pack signals were not progressing beyond recognition and response calls. Given time that might change as the syntax of true speech surfaced alongside increased intelligence. Developmentally they had a long way to go to catch up with the advanced apes, but the new and improved type of wolf was on track to becoming a higher lifeform.
And that embryonic prospect roused Hawg’s bloodlust, giving him the impetus to methodically hunt them down whenever the opportunity arose, expending energy on exterminating a species with no clear-cut gain but the grim certainty of seeing them die. On a subconscious level he perceived the latent super-wolves as a budding threat that must not be allowed to flower. And so he acted on his compulsion.
Hawg searched for his fallen spear, spied it lying at the feet of the growling wolf. Eight feet in length, it unashamedly looked a conservative weapon. When fashioning it, he discarded fitting the usual flint spearhead, reverting to the age-old method of fire-hardening a sharpened tip. This created a more efficient point for repeated stabbing crucial for a thrusting spear; the smoother tip would not snag on bone. But in doing so Hawg clung to the worn path of tradition his people trudged blindly down.
Weaponless but unfazed, he bent his primed body and spread his arms wide, intent on grappling his prey into submission. The wolf imitated his stance, her muzzle wrinkling in scorn and hatred.
Nowhere near human, but more than mere animal, her kind possessed on adaptive cunning bordering on sapience. Unlike Hawg, her pack collectively sensed when the rhythms of the natural world were imbalanced, and they recognised that Man caused the upheaval. There was a subtle shift of power in the natural order of things; the first trickle of loose stones preceding a major avalanche. Imbued with the latent faculty to shape his environment to his own wants and needs, Man was losing his innocence and destined to become a ferocious destroyer.
No match for the rising humans and fewer in number, the evolving wolves formed into packs of thirty, finding safety in numbers. Benefiting from the amazing climbing abilities toughened claws and suppler paws conferred, the daring bobtailed lupines took to scaling the chalk heights to snatch the cubs of their select enemy. Mindful in their deep-seated awareness that men posed a terrible threat severer than any cave bear or lion, they were responding to a more basic urge. The need to feed compelled them to regard the creature responsible for depleting their natural prey as an alternative food source. Attacking wholly under the shield of darkness, they engendered a reputation as monsters of the moonlit night, rising up on two legs to devour human pups, ripping out the seeds before they took root.
She leaped for Hawg jaws agape, forearms held stiffly behind her back. Stepping confidently into the wolf’s pounce, he seized her neck with a meaty hand and ducked behind her scrabbling claws, locking his elbow about her furry throat. Linking hands and exerting tremendous pressure, Hawg started choking the life from the outwitted she-wolf.
Canid behaviour made it simple for him to regain the upper hand. Contrary to how cats attack using clawed paws to trip and grasp prey, controlling quarry before delivering the killing neck bite, dogs lead only with the muzzle: a mouthful of sharp teeth subdued a bucking prey animal better than blunt nails. Spared having to avoid swiping paws permitted Hawg to concentrate of nullifying those chompers.
Fighting hard for her life, she thrashed about in the man’s unrelenting grip. Reacting like a constrictor he tightened his stranglehold. She whined piteously and, steadily deprived of air, ceased writhing. Unmoved, the powerful hunter squeezed harder and crushed her windpipe, dropping the carcass to the loamy forest floor.
Pain lanced through Hawg’s side, stealing his breath and chance to gloat over another triumph. Glancing down to see what agonized him, he was puzzling over the quivering wooden spear embedded in his hip when he got knocked on his backside by a second javelin thudding into his chest. Keeling over, lying bewildered and gasping on his uninjured side, Hawg witnessed a lanky giant garbed in coarse bearskins stride brazenly into the clearing, hefting another of those lightweight throwing spears over his shoulder as he approached the stricken Neanderthal. His sparsely bearded face impassive, only the newcomer’s startling blue eyes showed emotion - creepy, unadulterated pleasure.
His evident humanness spotlighted the fact that he was not clan. Comparatively new kids on the block, the Cro-Magnons were taking the prehistoric world by storm. Innovative, artistic, nomadic – Hawg’s cousins unlocked, and would exceed, the potential thus far unrealized by humankind. Center stage for so long, Neanderthal Man would soon take his final curtain call and bow out forever.
Distracted by the spear protruding killingly from his chest, Hawg compared the weapon with its user; willowy, even fragilely built, both projected a sense of unfussy deadliness.
The fleeting lucidness fatality bestows opened Hawg’s dimming sight to the glaring obvious; he had misspent his woefully short lifespan targeting the wrong competitor. All along the direr threat had been his brother man, not the precursor of the dog.
As he died, thoughts endlessly churning inside a brain refusing to accept the empty finality of death, Hawg belatedly realized nobody would scrape out a shallow grave in which to bury him, or ritually arrange prized possessions beside his corpse placed in the fetal position. Perhaps the Neanderthals showed the promise of religious sentiment after all.
Stooping, his shell necklace rattling, Nalla examined the speared Neanderthal. Glancing at the strangled wolf alongside, he viewed them jointly as rival predators deserving to be slain out of hand. Where his fellow hunters concentrated on repulsing the predation of the climbing wolves, Nalla hunted Neanderthals purely for sport; it was impersonal, unprejudiced. He simply regarded his cousins as the ultimate prey; bastardized men armed similarly to him with flint and guile.
Nalla conceitedly deemed himself fully human, racially pure. Anatomically nigh on identical to us, if you bathed him, shaved him, dressed him in a business suit, he would not look out of place on Wall Street. Mentally, he reasoned just as psychotically as modern man, plagued with the hang-ups of a mind undergoing unrestrained enlargement: think of an egg shell crazing and the yolk oozing out between the hairline cracks. Finding an outlet for his neuroses, Nalla held the unrecorded notoriety of emergent humanity’s first serial killer: for him the thrill of the hunt transmuted into the empowering joy of killing.
Dragging the limp wolf by the back legs, he draped the carcass over his shoulders and stood, grunting from lifting the additional weight. Meagre as the meat yield of Hawg’s pilfered kill was, the Ice Age credo Waste not, want not persisted. Savoring the looseness of tribal polygamy, Nalla intended gifting the pelt to his next female conquest in return for sexual favours. Prostitution was indeed the world’s oldest profession!
Moonlight beamed into the arena and Nalla spared the night-sun a passing look in between yanking spears out of his victim’s body. Finished retrieving his weapons, he marched from the clearing, callously leaving Hawg for the scavengers. Strident baying farther up the valley elicited answering howls; ghostly echoes fading into distant time. An evolutional dead end, the super-wolves inability to adapt faster than primitive man marked them an experiment doomed to fail. Fated, like the original cave men, to be gone but not forgotten.
Retaining a core memory of the persecuting lupines, future pre-industrial humans would forever associate the vanished wolves-that-walked-like-men with the moon, birthing the legend of the werewolf.
