The Dawn of Man (A New Short Story)

I’m teaching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey next week, and while I was watching the “Dawn of Man” prologue to the movie  – in which the apes discover the idea of using tools under the influence of the humming monolith – I had an idea for a short story narrated by the ape who first discovers how to smash things with bones. And here it is!

*

Look, I feel bad about the tapir. I do. But at the time, it wasn’t really a question of empathy, or of cross-species consciousness, or what have you. No, it was much more a question of discovery. Do you get me? The tapir was minding his own business, I accept that. He had as much right to graze the savannah as any of us. But once you get an idea into your head, that idea takes on a life of its own, you know? And then all of a sudden you find yourself clubbing a tapir to death and chowing down on raw tapir-meat and people are saying, What’s your problem with tapirs, Largest Ape in the Tribe? And I’m like, Hey the idea took me where it took me, all right? I think you can see where I’m coming from.

Or maybe you can’t. I mean the whole idea of “ideas” as such is still pretty new, right? In the sense that I’m the first hominid ever to actually have one – an idea, I mean. For a long time none of us had any idea about ideas. There we were, sleeping in caves, picking the nits out of each other’s fur, and generally going about our lives in a peaceable fashion – if you discount the occasional shrieking-match or skirmish with a rival tribe. (And can I just say while I’m on the subject, the Tribe from Under the Big Tree by the Next Watering-Hole Along? Those guys can go fuck themselves. Seriously. I’m still pretty pissed off about that fruit-stealing incident from several roughly equal periods of darkness and light ago, and I think Second-Largest Ape in the Tribe will support me on that.) My point is that before I picked up that bone and started whacking shit with it, the closest any of us had come to an idea was stuff like have sex now, or get away from my fruit. And to call stuff like that ideas is really – let’s be honest – pretty generous. Nope, I was the first real ideas-ape – that’s my claim to fame – and even though I really only managed to come up with one idea, I think you’ll agree it’s a doozy. It’s certainly made a big difference around here, I don’t have to tell you.

Let me recreate the moment. It’s your average day on the plains. Hot Bright Thing is doing its hot, bright thing up there above us all. Everyone’s just lazing around – we had a real issue with morale on those hot, bright days, a real lassitude problem. Nobody could even be bothered to get worked up about food, or fucking, or anything. I tried to get Third-Largest Ape and Sexual Partner of Third-Largest Ape to come for a bit of a forage with me, but they waved me away and scuttled off to hide in the shadow under a rock, the lazy bastards. So there I was, compelled to go off foraging on my own. And I had no luck. All I could find was a big pile of bones – the bleached bones of some poor tapir, lying there in the dust. I’ll say it again: I have no problem with tapirs, it’s not a tapir thing, it just so happened that it was a tapir bone that gave me the idea – the World’s First Idea, the thing that’s changed everything, if I do say so myself.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. The big thing back then – I’m sure you all remember – was Huge Grey Block. This was what most of my fellow hominids were doing with their time, back in the pre-ideas era: hanging around Huge Grey Block, which – as we all know – just appeared one morning outside our cave, sitting there and doing bugger-all. Yeah, Huge Grey Block had become a real hobby, a real pastime, around then. Second-Largest Ape in the Tribe and Smallest Ape in the Tribe were the real project leaders on this, to give credit where it’s due. Their thing was jumping around Huge Grey Block and screaming at it – maybe touching it a little bit, trying to see if it was edible, I guess.

Me, I was skeptical. Huge Grey Block had already been around for three or four roughly equal periods of light and darkness, and it still didn’t seem to be doing a whole lot with its time. “What about Humming Noise,” Smallest Ape in the Tribe would grunt, whenever I raised this point. Which, fair enough: Huge Grey Block did seem to have this humming noise thing going on. Got right into your inner ear, that noise. Seemed to mess around with the mush inside your head, in some strange way. It was getting to be kind of a drag, or so I felt.

So I’d be lying if I said my foraging expedition that day didn’t have something to do with getting away from Huge Grey Block and Humming Noise. Mainly I just wanted some peace and quiet, plus maybe a snack if there was anything to be had. But as I mentioned, all I found was a bunch of tapir bones. It was depressing. No fruit trees, no small scurrying animals, no water. Just dry bones. It was a rough day to be a hungry hominid, and no mistake.

Anyway. There I am, sitting among the bones, feeling pretty blue. And I find my fingers have curled around one of the larger bones in the pile. Nothing remarkable there. Nothing that hasn’t happened a hundred times before. It’s quite nice, actually, the feel of clean bone on your skin. Smooth and warm, with little ridges and cracks under your fingertips. It passes the time, in any event.

But something was different that day. I know, I know – I’ve told this part of the story so often that it’s in danger of becoming a cliché. But to some of the younger apes it may still be fresh. Some of you young tool-users may want to know what it was like, discovering the concept of tool-use for the very first time. So I’m sitting there with my fingers curled around this bone. And without even really thinking about it, I find I’m touching the bone harder than usual – my fingers have curled around so that they’re actually touching the palm of my hand, with (and this is the crucial point) the bone sort of gripped or clasped in the middle. Of course now we know what a revolutionary concept this is – it has, after all, given us all sorts of other ideas, like “lifting” and “carrying,” et cetera – but at the time, I freely admit, I just sort of went, “Huh.”

So here’s this bone in my hand. And about five seconds later, I’m like: This bone is IN MY HAND. I was like, Wow. Okay. That’s new. And then I just did it: I used my arm to lift the bone up and put it above my head. And it stayed there.

It seems like nothing, now – like no big deal. But at the time, if you had told one of your fellow hominids: “Hey, I just used my hand to move a bone and now the bone is above my head and it’s staying there,” they would have been all like, “What the fuck are you talking about, Largest Ape in the Tribe? That’s impossible!” And when I did tell people, it absolutely blew their minds.

So I’m there, holding this bone aloft. And I asked myself the obvious question: What next? In the event, it was purely a matter of logic: I moved the bone back down again. And I want you to know, as you sit there listening to me, that I had absolutely no idea what would happen next. And this, I think, is really the essence of having an idea. You have an idea, and all bets are off. You just don’t know what you’re getting into, once you set an idea loose in the world. Superfically, I might have been waving a bone around out there on the savannah under the Hot Bright Thing, but really I was in the dark. But of course I was. This was cutting-edge stuff – the front line of technology. Completely unpredictable. It could have gone disastrously wrong. I could have been killed. There was just no way of knowing.

Three seconds later, I’m looking at a smashed tapir skull and thinking, Did I do that? Naturally, I was dubious. The skull could easily have smashed by itself – independently of the thing I was doing with my fingers and my arm and the bone. There was only one way to confirm my suspicions. I moved the bone up and down with my arm again. Boom! Another pile of smashed skull bits.

By this stage, I was starting to feel pretty good. We all know the feeling by now, of course – the good feeling that comes from smashing things with a bone. But at the time I was scared shitless. I was experiencing something no one had ever experienced before – and that’s always a mindfuck.

I’ll skip over the next few hours of experimental confirmation, which were mostly taken up with smashing more tapir bones and reassuring myself that the good feeling I had about doing this was normal. Since that morning, the conclusions I reached have been pretty thoroughly verified by real-world testing – if you smash something with a bone, it stays smashed, and all that. But there was more to come. Sure, I’d had a breakthrough. But there was still the question of practical application.

That’s when I saw the tapir. Now I’ll be the first to admit that one of the most serious consequences of the widespread adoption of my idea has been that the tapirs are now afraid of us and consequently much more difficult to hunt. I take full responsibility for that. I do. But I would argue, in counterpoint, that the bone-to-the-head method of killing tapirs has made the whole process about a million times more efficient. So what we’ve lost in tapir access, we’ve gained in tapir killability. Which I think is a real, undeniable improvement. But you all know my feelings on this and I won’t bore you with them once again.

Really I just want to remind everyone that it’s not a tapir thing specifically. I really do think that my idea has broader applications than just tapir-killing, and I’ve made the point many times that we need to look into experimenting with smashing other animals over the head with bones. The reason I started with a tapir is that a tapir happened to cross my path at the key moment. That was it. If we do nothing but kill tapirs, it really is going to seem like we’re just anti-tapir as a matter of policy, and that’s going to make us look bad.

But anyway. Sometimes people will ask me, “Hey, Largest Ape in the Tribe, now that you’ve come up with an idea – and, some would argue, with the very idea of ideas as such – where do you think we’re headed, as a society? What’s the next idea going to be?” And I don’t know if I have any good answers to this question. There are always rumours, of course. Just the other day, Not the Smallest Ape in the Tribe was talking about Tribe From the Other Side of the River, who have apparently diversified into using rocks instead of bones to smash things with. It seems crazy to me, but there you go. I will say that I have no time whatsoever for those rumourmongers who claim that certain apes in certain other tribes have used bones to smash other apes over the head in some sort of power-grab or war maneuvre. I think that’s a horrifying concept and I reject it completely. Smashing animals over the head with bones is a benevolent technology. It’s liberated us from what was – let’s face it – a pretty benighted phase in our history. If people are even thinking of using smashing animals over the head for destructive purposes, then I don’t know what kind of world we’re living in.

But I’ve gone on long enough. The Humming Noise from Huge Grey Block is starting to get to me, and Hot Bright Thing is about to be replaced by Cold, Less Bright Thing, which is my signal to retire for the evening. Thanks for listening, and remember: keep your eyes open. There are ideas everywhere. You just have to know where to look.