underpins everything from space flight to nuclear power and GPS systems.”
Karowitz gestured to the cases beside them, filled with ancient human skeletons.
“Part of the problem is that we’re not familiar with geological and evolutionary timescales. Humans live for perhaps a century, but life has evolved over billions of years, and only those who have a religious motive continue to deny what stares them in the face.”
“So you think that they’re afraid that what Lucy found might cost them their influence, these creationist groups?” Ethan hazarded.
“Exactly,” Karowitz said. “You said that we evolved from the apes, but that’s another creationist myth. We evolved alongside the apes and continue to do so. Our evolutionary paths diverged from a common ancestor some eight million years ago, eventually diversifying into some twenty different homonin species. But by the last million years or so, there were only four species of man left walking the Earth: Homo heidelbergensis, from whom Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis evolved, and our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, who dwelled in Africa. As a result of natural selection, only we, Homo sapiens, remain to this day.”
“And our ancestors were what Lucy was originally looking for?” Ethan asked.
Karowitz nodded.
“Under my mentorship, Lucy made some incredible finds out in the southern Negev over a very short period of time. But she also began undertaking work for a private group, and somewhere out there she found something entirely different.”
“Something that was not one of our ancestral species,” Ethan said.
“No,” Karowitz said, “what Lucy found was—”
“Unknown,” Cooper interrupted sharply again.
“We have e-mails from Lucy,” Rachel said to Cooper, “detailing the remains and their appearance and—”
“And I get e-mails every day telling me I’ve won the Nigerian lottery,” Cooper rumbled. “But I haven’t started showering in frigging champagne.”
Ethan ignored Cooper, barging in front of him to speak to Karowitz. “What makes you so sure the remains were not human?”
“The physiology Lucy described was remarkably different,” Karowitz said. “The specimen’s bone structure was far more robust than a human and the chest plate was fused, therefore its lungs would have differed from ours. Its bones were latticed, something known to have been common in some dinosaurs to save weight, and it also bore an extended cranial cavity that may have served a communicative purpose by infrasound, again a known adaption in some species on Earth.”
Ethan nodded. “And you think that this species might have been responsible for interfering with human evolution?”
“Not our evolution,” Karowitz cautioned, “but our developmental history.” He looked at Rachel and began quoting. “‘And Azadel brought the men knowledge, and taught them of the metals and the fields and the things of the earth, and made them strong …’”
Rachel’s eyes glazed over as she instinctively took up the recital.
“‘…and God struck down the angel Azadel, and buried him amongst the earth, and covered him with sharp rocks and covered his eyes with earth so that they may not see.’” She looked at Karowitz. “The Book of Enoch.”
“Among many other books,” Karowitz said, pacing up and down as he spoke. “The supposed contacts between ancient man and their various gods share remarkable details that some people believe may record the presence of beings on this Earth of technological superiority so great that they would have appeared to early man to literally be gods.”
“Arthur C. Clarke said as much in one of his books,” Rachel said. “His Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.”
Ethan frowned thoughtfully.
“But if life in the Levant at the time was good, why would man have needed help?”
“Man was surviving, but only just,” Karowitz said. “The warming after the Last Glacial Maximum was interrupted by an event called the Younger Dryas, an extreme thousand-year chill that caused the Holocene Extinction Event, when all of the megafauna like mammoths became extinct. Mankind also almost died out, and those few who survived would have been greatly separated in small groups with poor genetic diversity.”
“What caused the event?” Ethan asked.
“Nobody’s sure,” Karowitz replied, “but a charred sediment layer at many sites that includes nanodiamonds, iridium, charcoal, and magnetic spherules is consistent with a major cometary strike at that time. The airburst explosion of a carbonaceous chondrite comet could have caused the major extinction around twelve thousand years ago.”
“Okay, so we survived, but things went down the can,” Ethan said.
“To put it mildly. The point is that it’s after this catastrophe, when human numbers and resources were severely depleted, that human civilization is born when it probably should have collapsed. We