The Songlines

  Elizabeth Vrba said, at some point in the conversation, that antelopes are stimulated to migrate by lightning.

  ‘So’, I said, ‘are the Kalahari Bushmen. They also “follow” the lightning. For where the lightning has been, there will be water, greenery and game.’

  When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.

  J. G. Hamann

  The linguistic ability of Homo habilis may have been limited to grunts and howls and hisses: we shall never know. A brain does not survive the process of fossilisation. Yet its contours and lineaments do leave their imprint inside the skull. Casts can be taken; and these ‘endocasts’ be set beside one another, and compared.

  Paris, Musée de l’Homme, 1984

  In his meticulous office, Professor Yves Coppens – one of the most lucid minds in the fossil man business – had lined up a series of such endocasts; the moment he passed from Australopithecus to man, I had a sense of something startling and new.

  Not only does the brain increase in size (by almost half), but also in shape. The parietal and temporal regions – the seats of sensory intelligence and learning – are transformed and become far more complex. Broca’s Area, a region known to be inseparable from speech co-ordination, makes its first appearance. The membranes thicken. The synapses multiply: as do the veins and arteries which irrigate the brain with blood.

  Inside the mouth, too, there are major architectural changes, especially in the alveolar region where the tongue hits the palate. And since man is by definition the Language Animal, it is hard to see what these changes are about unless they are for language.

  The subsequent stages of human evolution – through Homo erectus to H. sapiens sapiens – do not, in Coppens’s view, warrant the status of a separate species. Rather, they should be seen as transformation of the original model: Homo habilis.

  ‘Long experience of Homo habilis’, he writes in Le Singe, l’Afrique et l’homme, ‘has led me to believe that it is to him we should address the question: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? His sudden triumph seems so brilliant, so extraordinary and so new, that I would gladly choose this species, and this part of the world, to situate the origin of memory and language.’

  ‘I know this may sound far-fetched,’ I said to Elizabeth Vrba, ‘but if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”?, I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.”’

  She looked a bit startled. Then, reaching for a drawer in her desk, she fished out a water colour: an artist’s impression of a family of the First Men, and their children, tramping in single file across an empty waste.

  She smiled and said, ‘I also think the hominids migrated.’

  Who, then, was the killer in the cave?

  Leopards prefer to eat their kill in the darkest possible recesses. And at an early stage of his inquiry, Brain believed it was they who were responsible for the carnage: which, indeed, they may have been, in part.

  Among the fossils in the Red Room he showed me the incomplete calvarium of a young male Homo habilis. Towards the front of the skull there are the marks of a brain tumour: so he may have been the idiot of the band. On the base, there are two neat holes about an inch apart. Brain then took the fossil skull of a leopard found in the same stratum and showed me how the lower canines fit perfectly into the two holes. A leopard drags its kill by fastening its jaws around the skull, as a cat will carry a mouse.

  The holes were in exactly the right position.

  Bhimtal, Kumaon, India

  One afternoon, I walked over to see the Shaivite saddhu in his hermitage on the opposite hill. He was a very saintly person, who took my offering of a few rupees and wrapped them, reverentially, in the corner of his orange robe. He sat cross-legged on his leopard-skin. His beard flowed over his knees and, while he boiled the water for tea, the cockroaches crawled up and down it. Below the hermitage there was a leopard cave. On moonlit nights the leopard would come into the garden, and he and the saddhu would look at each other.

  But the older people in the village could recall with horror the time of the ‘man-eaters’, when no one was safe, even behind bolted doors.

  At Rudraprayag, to the north of here, a man-eater ate more than 125 people before Jim Corbett shot him. In one case, the beast battered down the door of a stable; crawled over or under the bodies of forty live goats without touching a single one; and finally grabbed the young goatherd, asleep, by himself, in the farthest corner of the hut.

  Transvaal Museum

  A leopard will turn ‘man-eater’ usually – though not always – as a result of an accident, such as a missing canine. But once the animal gets a taste for human flesh, it will touch no other.

  When Brain came to tot up the percentages of primate fossils: that is, of baboons and hominids, both in the ‘robust’ level at Swartkrans and the africanus level at Sterkfontein, he found to his astonishment that primate bones accounted for 52.9 per cent and 69.8 per cent of the total prey spectrum. Antelopes and other mammals made up the rest. Whichever beast (or beasts) used the caves as its charnel-house, it had a taste for ‘primate’.

  Brain toyed with the idea that ‘man-eating’ leopards had been at work; but there were several snags to this hypothesis:

  Statistics from African game-parks show that baboons account for no more than 2 per cent of a normal leopard’s diet.

  In the upper levels at Swartkrans, when the cave was definitely tenanted by leopards, they left plentiful remains of their usual prey, the springbok, while baboons are down to 3 per cent.

  Was it possible that leopards had passed through an ‘abnormal’ man-eating phase – and then returned to their previous habits?

  Besides, when Elizabeth Vrba came to analyse the bovid bones from the caves, she found a preponderance of animals, such as the giant hartebeeste, too hefty for a leopard to cope with. Some other, more powerful carnivore must have been at work. Which?

  There are three principal candidates, all now extinct, all of whom have left their fossils in the Sterkfontein Valley.

  The long-legged hunting hyenas, Hyenictis and Euryboas.

  The macheirodonts, or sabre-tooth cats.

  The genus Dinofelis, ‘the false sabre-tooth’.

  The sabre-tooths had huge neck muscles and a powerful leap; and in their upper jaws they had scythe-like canines, serrated along the cutting edge, which, with a downward thrust, they would plunge into the neck of their prey. They were especially adapted for felling large herbivores. Their carnassial teeth were more efficient as meat-slicers than those of any other carnivore. Yet their lower jaws were weak: so weak that they were unable to finish off a skeleton.

  Griff Ewer once suggested that the bone-crushing molars of the hyena had evolved in answer to the plentiful supply of uneaten carcasses which sabre-tooths left behind.

  Obviously, the Sterkfontein Valley caves were occupied by a variety of carnivores, over a very long stretch of time.

  Brain felt that a proportion of the bones, especially those of the larger antelopes, could have been brought there by the sabre-tooths and hyenas, working in tandem. The hunting hyenas, too, might have been responsible for bringing in some hominids.

  But let us pass to the third alternative.

  Dinofelis was a cat less agile than a leopard or cheetah but far more solidly built. It had straight, dagger-like killing teeth, midway in form between a sabre-tooth’s and, say, the modern tiger’s. Its lower jaw could slam shut; and since, with its slightly cumbersome build, it must have hunted by stealth, it must also have hunted by night. It may have been spotted. It could have been striped. It might, like a panther, have been black.

  Its bones have been unearthed from the Transvaal to Ethiopia: that is, the original range of man.

  In the Red Room, I’ve just held in my hands a fossil skull of Dinofelis, a perfect specimen, patinated treacly brown. I made a point of articulating the lower jaw and staring steadily into the fangs as I closed them.

  The
skull comes from one of three complete Dinofelis skeletons – a male, a female and a ‘boy’ – which were found fossilised along with eight baboons and no other animals at Bolt’s Farm, a short way from Swartkrans, in 1947–8. Their finder, H. B. S. Cooke, suggested that the Dinofelis ‘family’ had been out baboon hunting, when they had all fallen into some natural pit, and all died together.

  A strange end! But no stranger than the still unanswered questions: Why, in these caves, were there so many baboons and hominids? Why so few antelopes and other species?

  Brain puzzled over the possibilities with his habitual caution, and, tentatively, in the final paragraphs of The Hunters or the Hunted? put forward two complementary hypotheses.

  The hominids might not have been dragged into the cave: they might have lived there along with their destroyer. On Mount Suswa, a dormant volcano in Kenya, there are long lava tunnels, with leopards living in the depths and baboon troops sheltering in the entrance by night. The leopards have a living larder at their own front door.

  In the Transvaal, the winter nights are cold: so cold that the number of baboons in the High Veldt is limited by the number of caves or shelters available for sleeping in. At the time of the First Northern Glaciation, there may have been a hundred nights of frost. And in the cold, let us now imagine robustus: migrants who will have trekked to the highlands in summer and retired to the valleys in winter, without defences but their own brute strength; without fire; without warmth but their own huddled bodies; night-blind, yet forced to share their quarters with a glitter-eyed cat, who, now and then, will have prowled out to grab a straggler.

  The second hypothesis introduces an idea to set the head spinning.

  Could it be, Brain asks, that Dinofelis was a specialist predator on the primates?

  ‘A combination of robust jaws’, he writes, ‘and a well developed component in the dentition would have allowed Dinofelis to eat all parts of a primate skeleton except the skull. The hypothesis that Dinofelis was a specialist killer of the primates is persuasive.’

  Could it be, one is tempted to ask, that Dinofelis was Our Beast? A Beast set aside from all the other Avatars of Hell? The Arch-Enemy who stalked us, stealthily and cunningly, wherever we went? But whom, in the end, we got the better of?

  Coleridge once jotted in a notebook, ‘The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.’ What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel’s cell?

  The snakes, scorpions and other menacing creatures of the savannah – which, apart from their zoological actuality, have enjoyed a second career in the Hells of the Mystics – could never have threatened our existence, as such; never have postulated the end of our world. A specialist killer could have – which is why, however tenuous the evidence, we must take him seriously.

  ‘Bob’ Brain’s achievement, as I see it–whether we allow for one big cat, for several cats, or for horrors like the hunting hyena – is to have reinstated a figure whose presence has grown dimmer and dimmer since the close of the Middle Ages: the Prince of Darkness in all his sinister magnificence.

  Without straining the bounds of scientific rigour (as I undoubtedly have), he has laid bare the record of a tremendous victory – a victory on which we yet may build – when man, in becoming man, got the better of the powers of destruction.

  For suddenly, in the upper levels of Swartkrans and Sterkfontein, man is there. He is in charge and the predators are no longer with him.

  Compared to this victory, the rest of our achievements may be seen as so many frills. You could say we are a species on holiday. Yet perhaps it had to be a Pyrrhic victory: has not the whole of history been a search for false monsters? A nostalgia for the Beast we have lost? For the Gentleman who bowed out gracefully – and left us with the weapon in our hand?

  34

  ROLF AND I were having an evening drink when one of Estrella’s nurses came running over to say there was a man on the radio-telephone. I hoped it was Arkady. After all my outpouring on to paper I longed for a session of his cool, appraising talk.

  We both hurried over to the dispensary only to find it was not a man on the air, but a very gruff-voiced woman: Eileen Houston, of the Aboriginal Arts Bureau in Sydney.

  ‘Has Winston finished his painting yet?’ she growled.

  ‘He has,’ Rolf said.

  ‘OK. Tell him I’ll be over at nine sharp.’

  The line went dead.

  ‘Bitch,’ said Rolf.

  Winston Japurula, the most ‘important’ artist working at Cullen, had, only the week before, completed a major canvas and was waiting for Mrs Houston to come and buy it from him. Like many artists, he was generous with hand-outs, and had run up big debts at the store.

  Mrs Houston, who described herself as ‘the doyenne of dealers in Aboriginal Art’, had the habit of driving round the settlements to check up on her artists. She brought them paint and brushes and canvas, and would pay for finished work by cheque. She was a very determined woman. She always camped in the bush, alone – and was never not in a hurry.

  Next morning, Winston was waiting for her, cross-legged, naked to the waist, on a patch of level ground beside the petrol drums. He was an ageing voluptuary, with rolls of fat spilling over his paint-spattered shorts and an immense down-curving mouth. His sons and grandsons bore the stamp of his magnificent ugliness. He was doodling a monster on a scrap of card. He had acquired, by osmosis, the temperament and mannerisms of Lower West Broadway.

  His ‘policeman’ or ritual manager, a younger man in brown slacks called Bobby, was on hand to make sure Winston didn’t leak any sacred knowledge.

  At nine sharp, the boys sighted Mrs Houston’s red Land Cruiser coming up the airstrip. She got out, walked towards the group and set her haunches on a camping-stool.

  ‘Morning, Winston,’ she nodded.

  ‘Morning,’ he said, without moving.

  She was a big woman in a beige ‘battle-dress’. Her scarlet sunhat, like a topee, was rammed down over a head of greying curls. Her pale, heat-ravaged cheeks tapered off into a very pointed chin.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ she asked. ‘I thought I’d come to see a painting.’

  Winston fiddled with his hairstring and, with a wave, deputed his grandsons to fetch it from the store.

  Six of them came back carrying a large stretched canvas, say, seven foot by five, protected from the dust with a clear plastic sheet. They set it gingerly on the ground, and unwrapped it.

  Mrs Houston blinked. I watched her holding back a smile of pleasure. She had commissioned Winston to paint a ‘white’ picture. But this, I think, was beyond her expectations.

  So many Aboriginal artists used strident colour schemes. Here, simply, were six white to creamy-white circles, painted in meticulous ‘pointillist’ dots, on a background which varied from white to blueish white to the palest ochre. In the space between the circles there were a few snakelike squiggles in an equally pale lilac grey.

  Mrs Houston worked her lips. You could almost hear her mental calculations: a white gallery . . . a white abstraction . . . White on White . . . Malevich . . . New York . . .

  She dabbed the sweat from her brow and pulled herself together.

  ‘Winston!’ she pointed a finger at the canvas.

  ‘Yairs.’

  ‘Winston, you didn’t use the titanium white like I said! What’s the use my paying for expensive pigments if you don’t even use them? You’ve been using zinc white. Haven’t you? Answer me!’

  Winston’s reaction was to fold his arms across his face and peer through a chink, like a child playing peek-a-boo.

  ‘Did you, or did you not, use the titanium white?’

  ‘NO!’ Winston shouted, without lowering his arms.

  ‘I thought not,’ she said, and raised her chin in satisfaction.
br />   She then looked again at the canvas and spotted a tiny tear, less than an inch long, on the edge of one of the circles.

  ‘And look!’ she cried. ‘You’ve torn it. Winston, you’ve torn the canvas. Do you know what that means? This painting will have to be re-lined. I shall have to send this painting to the restorers in Melbourne. And it’ll cost at least three hundred dollars. It’s a shame.’

  Winston, who had dropped his defences, wrapped his arms around his face again and presented a blank front to the dealer.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ she repeated.

  The onlookers stared at the canvas as though they were staring at a corpse.

  Mrs Houston’s jaw began to quiver. She had gone too far, and would have to assume a more conciliatory tone.

  ‘But it’s a nice painting, Winston,’ she said. ‘It’ll do nicely for our travelling exhibition. I told you we were making a collection, didn’t I? Of all the best Pintupi artists? Didn’t I? Do you hear me?’

  Her voice sounded anxious. Winston said nothing.

  ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yairs,’ he drawled, and let down his arms.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’ She tried to laugh.

  ‘Yairs.’

  She took a pad and pencil from her shoulder bag.

  ‘So what’s the story, Winston?’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The story of the painting.’

  ‘I painted it.’

  ‘I know you painted it. I mean, what’s the Dreaming story? I can’t sell a painting without a story. You know that!’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Old Man,’ he said.