Isle of Woman (Geodyssey) Read online

for his sudden expansion, but merely substitutes one mystery for another. Why the surprising change? He also seems to have developed all the arts at this time, and been highly artistic ever since. Why not before?

  The key seems to relate to language. There is no evidence that the prior forms of man had any real language, though they may have had considerable vocabularies. What was needed was syntax: the set of rules by which words are combined into sentences. This seemingly minor advance did not come readily, taking tens of thousands of years to develop, but it had an enormous impact on communication, and on man’s culture, and ultimately his destiny. Words were symbols, and they had been used for a long time, but syntax enabled man to manipulate those symbols and to generate phenomenal structures of comprehension. With the advent of complex communication, humans could share knowledge with others, and pass it along from one generation to another. This multiplied mankind’s efficiency in many areas, particularly technology: his tools and weapons became more sophisticated, giving him a significant advantage in competition with nonlanguage folk. That technology enabled him to conquer the world.

  This leaves two of the mysteries. Since it seems that man’s physical development, including that of the brain, was complete by the time he left the Isle of Woman, why did it take so long for him to discover how to use that brain more efficiently? And why did the arts flower simultaneously? What did they have to do with speech and technology? Coincidence seems unlikely; nature always has a reason.

  Perhaps the answer appeared about 45,000 years ago, in the Levant. It is also possible that it happened earlier, in Africa, near Lake Victoria, and spread from there to the Levant, but that evidence is not yet solid. The place and time are not that important; what counts is why.

  BLAZE was using a sharp stone knife to carve a plump female human figure from soft wood when the girl approached. “May I join you, Blaze?” she inquired, employing the confusingly rapid and complicated succession of words these folk did.

  He glanced at her. She was brown-haired and pretty of feature, though as yet lank in the body. “Bunny,” he said, nodding affirmatively.

  She looked at the carving. “You are doing well.”

  He laughed. He could not begin to match the proficiency of the women or children of this tribe, any more than he could speak as they did. He could only try to emulate them, inadequately.

  “Tell me how you came here,” Bunny said.

  He smiled wryly. She well knew that he had been dragged in on a travois, unconscious, four years ago. She had been one of the children watching. “Bad,” he said.

  “No, I mean before then. You were young when you left your tribe—younger than I am now. Too young to seek a mate or to survive on your own. What impelled you to set out unprepared?”

  He caught the key words in her flow of dialogue: young, tribe, mate, survive. She was asking for his background. He had not tried to speak of it before, being embarrassed. But her interest was flattering.

  “Girl,” he explained. “Love.” He crossed his hands over his heart, augmenting the word. “Man. Mate.”

  “I understand,” Bunny said. “You loved a girl but she took another man. You had to go from there.”

  “Me choose hard,” he agreed, trying to emulate her flowing expression. “Me walk alone. Me join tribe.”

  Bunny could not contain her merriment. She had always been a happy girl, somewhat mischievous and presuming. In that, she reminded him painfully of his lost love. Indeed, she was thirteen, about that girl’s age when he had lost her. How young that seemed, in retrospect!

  “Now you had a difficult choice,” Bunny said carefully, coaching him.

  He tried. “Now you had—”

  She tittered. “Now who had?”

  Oh, yes. “Now me had. Hard—”

  “Now I had,” she said firmly.

  He shook his head. “Bunny. Me not know. Stupid.”

  “No, Blaze,” she said earnestly. “You are not stupid. You are doing better than any of the other immigrant adults here. No one else can speak as we who were raised in this language do. You are making progress. You are good. You must keep trying.”

  He spread his hands, still baffled by her elaborate and rapid spiel of words. He knew she was making sense, for he had seen other children and their mothers transmit the most complicated instructions, but his ear could not assimilate more than snatches of it.

  Bunny sighed. “I’m sorry. One thing at a time. You can get it, I know. Say ‘I.’”

  That much he thought he could do. “I hard. I walk alone. I join tribe.”

  She smiled. “That’s better. You had a difficult choice. You could try to survive alone, or you could try to join another tribe.”

  The nuances of her syntax were beyond him, but the essence came through when she rephrased his words. He continued his narrative.

  Neither of his original alternatives had seemed feasible. He was a fire tender; he lacked proper experience hunting or gathering. He had brought a bit of fire with him, so he would always have a hearth, but that was not enough. He had to try to join a tribe.

  But it soon had been apparent that no nearby tribe had need of a novice fire tender, and none of their girls wished to mate with a twelve-year-old boy. Especially not one with an ugly red burn mark on his forehead. Blaze had to give it up and try to make it by himself. He got hungry and tired, and finally had no strength left to walk farther, and then none to sit up. His last memory was of the grass at his cheek as he lay facedown beside the trail leading to nowhere.

  “And when you woke, you were in our tribe,” Bunny said brightly. “I remember when they dragged you in. We thought you were dead. But all you needed was food and water.”

  “Food,” he agreed wanly. “Water. Not why.”

  “You did not understand why our men had brought you,” she agreed. “It was because they were out fetching babies. They saw you were young, and since they hadn’t found any babies that day, they brought you in instead.”

  For this was an unusual tribe. It had started long ago with the rejects of other tribes—men who had not been accepted for mating. The ugly, or incompetent, or old—some of whom had been cast out by their tribes because they were no longer sufficiently useful. They had been expected to die, but some had survived and formed their own band. There had gotten to be about twenty of them, culled from all across the region. Then a woman had come. She was young and reasonably attractive, but had been cast out because she was barren. She wanted more than anything else to be a mother. She thought that perhaps if she tried harder, she could get a baby. So she tried, with every man of the band who was willing. She was able to try several times a day. But she didn’t get a baby, despite an effort that continued for years.

  Then one of the men brought in a baby that had been left out to die. It was a boy several months old and he seemed healthy. Perhaps his mother had died, so there was no one to care for him. The woman fed him with water and fruit juice and mashed nuts, and he lost weight but finally managed to survive. The woman was pleased. She had a son. The band had a child.

  After that they fetched in any babies they found. Most of them died, and the tribe ate the meat. But some survived. In time there was a fair number. There were also other women, some old, some ugly, but they were willing to work and they had knowledge that helped more babies to survive. The haphazard band had become a tribe, of sorts.

  As time passed there were more surviving children, male and female. Because there were no nursing mothers, they were raised together, with several adults always watching over them and supervising their feeding. The children quickly learned the words used by their diverse “parents” and began communicating among themselves. At first they were satisfied with the individual words, but then something strange happened. They began making up words of their own that the adults didn’t understand, because they seemed to be meaningless. But somehow they served to put the regular words together, making them more versatile. The children played games, finding ever-more-sophisti
cated modes of communication. It got so that if an adult wanted to organize something complicated, he conveyed it to one child with attendant gestures and demonstration, and that child then went and spewed out a rapid series of words and not-words to the others-—and all of them understood precisely. It was a marvel.

  For example, once there had been a rare find: a large animal had been accidentally killed in a distant valley. Men from two groups had spied the fresh carcass. One man had trudged home and taken the time necessary to indicate the situation. Since his tribe was not far away, there was no immediate rush. But the other group had been this one, and there had been a boy along. He had had a notion, run swiftly home alone—and all the other children had understood him immediately. They had indicated to the mystified adults what was required, conveying extreme urgency, and the entire group had traveled swiftly to the site. They had plunged in, carving up the body and hauling the sections away on travois, while the children spread out to watch for members of the other tribe. When the men of the other tribe approached, the children gave warning, and the procedure was hastened. When the others arrived, the entire beast was gone. Rapid and accurate communication had enabled the home group to prevail. They had eaten well for some time thereafter.

  As the children grew to maturity, their facility continued. Now, as decision-making adults, they increased their power. They converted the haphazard group into a tightly organized tribe. Their communication seemed magical. They discussed strategies among themselves, and devised shortcut signals, so that a single hoot across the forest could mean that there was something worth getting, and convey its nature. Sometimes they managed to steal meat from other tribes, by making highly organized raids. When other tribes tried to retaliate, they found nothing, because lookouts spotted them and indicated exactly how many were coming on what path, and when they would arrive.

  For all that, the children, together with their maturing members, were fun-loving and creative. They laughed often at things that left the others blank. It seemed that there were verbal games that only they understood. They made sketches in the dirt, discussing them in detail—and after that they were able to separate and come together at another place by several different routes, simultaneously. Blaze had seen it happen, and remained mystified.

  “We draw maps,” Bunny explained. “We devise routes, and agree to go to particular places at particular times, and—”

  “Times?” Blaze asked, catching a word he knew he didn’t know.

  “A morning, or noon, or night, or another day,” she said. “Or noon plus the distance the sun travels a finger width. Timing is essential, especially when we have to fight. We review what happened yesterday, and plan for tomorrow.”

  But it was too much for Blaze. His mind simply couldn’t grasp their weird concepts. How the sun traveling a finger width related to fighting hostile tribesmen would always be a mystery to him.

  “But not to your children,” Bunny said wisely. “When a baby grows up with us, he learns our way. Somehow it seems to happen when children are little; they must learn then, or they never do. So our nursing mothers do not go out to forage; they stay with the nursery, so their babies can learn from the others. This makes it harder to bring in as much to eat, but it must be. We make up for it by being more clever in the foraging and hunting we do.”

  Indeed they were more clever. When a hunting party went out, the men had better weapons, because craftsmen were better at making them. Whatever one person knew, he conveyed to others, and this resulted in superior technique. These folk were like a species apart, much smarter than anyone elsewhere.

  “Would you like to have children like that?” Bunny inquired.

  “Me—child—smart?” he asked, working out her import. “Yes.” Certainly he would like to have children of his own who could be like that. He appreciated the wonders of their cleverness, and wondered why this intelligent tribe tolerated dull folk like him in its midst. True, he tended the fires well, but any of the clever ones could do it as well or better, because they had comprehension he lacked.

  She looked him in the eye. “Then be my mate, and I will give them to you.”

  “Me—mate—Bunny?” He laughed, dismissing it as humor. He was too stupid to join this tribe, and she was too young.

  But she did not laugh with him. “I must mate with a man from another tribe, but I prefer not to take a stranger. I have known you four years, since I was nine, and in all that time you have been reliable and gentle. I like you, Blaze, and I want you for my own. And if you like this tribe, as I know you do, you can remain in it for the rest of your life, by mating with one of its women. With me. Why not do it?”

  He stared at her. She seemed to be serious! “You—child,” he said. “Me—ugly.” He touched his off-color forehead.

  “You think the mark of your profession makes you ugly?” she asked. “That for your ugliness!” And she kissed him on the forehead, right on the mark.

  He was amazed. He just couldn’t believe that this child could be ready for anything like this. He had never thought of her in that way. But now he realized that her eyes were green, and that in her approach she resembled the one he had loved. Could it be? She had always been alert and bright and humorous, but she had never teased. When she spoke seriously, she always meant what she said.

  “As for me,” she said, “I will dance for you.” She looked back over her shoulder, catching the eye of a boy about her own age who seemed to have been waiting for the signal. He began to pat his hands on a drum, which was an invention of the smart folk. It was a section of a sapling tied into a circle, with an animal hide fastened tautly across it. Boom-boom-boom-boom, a regular and pleasant beat.

  Bunny got up and went into the Woman Show. It was as if Blaze’s lost love were doing it; the memory was painful yet exciting. She turned and leaped, and flung out her hips and her hair, and the flesh of her body shook in ways he had not before appreciated in connection with her. She had indeed grown into a young woman, and now she was showing it. She was beautiful.

  But there was more to it than that. Bunny was not naked, she was clothed, wearing a woven skirt. Her motions were not random or impromptu, but choreographed. Her feet touched the ground in time to the beat of the drum—and now others had appeared, and were humming, also to that beat. As the folk of this tribe made attractive wood carvings, or finely pointed stone knives, or intricate pictures in sand, so too did they dance. She was showing her art. When she spun, and her skirt flung out, showing glimpses of her upper thighs and genital section, she excited his sexual interest—but he also appreciated the aesthetics of it. The motions and the beat, together. He knew that his appreciation was only a shadow of that felt by any of the regular folk of the tribe, but it still enhanced the effect.

  By the time Bunny finished, a crowd of others had gathered. They were all enjoying the show, though none of them hoped to mate with her. That was another aspect of it: enjoyment for the sake of nothing else.

  She made a final turn, and came to stand before him. “Now, don’t embarrass me before this audience by refusing me,” she told him. “I have publicized my desire for you. Will you take me?”

  Blaze realized that he had been foolish to hang on to his impossible former love. He would probably never receive a better offer than this present one—and he had not even had to go to her. She had come to him. She had arranged this elegant proposal, drawing on the uncanny ability of her kind to plan ahead and coordinate with others. Blaze was immensely flattered. He now appreciated how easy it would be to love her. He was already experiencing the first great surge of it.

  But over her shoulder Blaze saw one detail that saddened him. The boy—the young man—of the drum, who had done Bunny’s bidding so well, was staring with emotional pain. He had done what he had to do, to please the girl he loved but could never mate with. Now he was suffering the agony of her loss. How well Blaze understood!

  Thus the possible answers to the mysteries: when unique circumstances caused a gro
up of babies and children to be raised in a communal situation, their single-word speech evolved into something like a pidgin, and then into a Creole, on the way to becoming the first full-fledged language. This is a process that still happens when there is an assemblage of people with different linguistic backgrounds. First they communicate by means of a pidgin, which is a simplified form of a language consisting mostly of vocabulary with elementary grammatical rules. This is crude, but it gets the job done. Their children, however, raised speaking the pidgin, quickly evolve more sophisticated structure, developing a creole. This can be effective in itself with the nuances and competence we expect in a recognized language. No one teaches these children these rules; they seem to evolve naturally, as if humanity has an inherent set of rules that emerges in the absence of an already established language. So all that is required is a vocabulary and children.

  Apparently the way the brain processes language is established early, from infancy to several years of age. The fundamental paths are set up according to the available material, and do not change thereafter. If a child is raised alone, without exposure to language, his brain becomes set in an alternate mode, and he can never learn to speak with facility. The wiring is simply wrong. Thus it is not surprising that humanity did not develop full language early. As with a dry field that remains untouched until there is a spark that starts a fire, then burns vigorously, the process is not automatic. The potential is there, but not the realization. When chance, after perhaps 50,000 years, provided a suitable vocabulary to a group of children in the formative stage, they reshaped it into something more. Always before, babies had been constantly with their mothers, normally one at a time, so that they could nurse regularly, and their mothers were out foraging. There was no permanent community of children. Once that occurred, and language developed, it continued, for subsequent children were exposed not to isolated words but to the full language of their parents. The nature of the human mind was literally changed. There was nothing inevitable about it, any more than there is about the striking of a spark that ignites a fire.