The scientific conference was held at the Palais des Expositions in Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament, in the east of France facing Germany on the opposite side of the Rhine. Fitznorman was conveniently lodged in the Strasbourg Hilton, just a short walk across the park from the conference centre. He had checked in for the second day of the conference, but before confronting the esoteric presentations he decided a stroll in the old city centre would do him well.
The cold December fog eerily draped the historic cathedral that rose out of the gaily decorated Marché de Noel, the spire disappearing into a strange phosphorescent shroud. He wandered through the crowd inspecting the rows of small wooden kiosks, brightly illuminated with their coloured lights reflecting on the displays of Christmas decorations and goods.
Amongst the crowd of well wrapped up Christmas shoppers, he spied Paul Cathary joking with a vendor at one of the kiosks, he was holding a small glass lamp in the form of a Christmas tree that had attracted his attention. Fitznorman approached, standing a few paces behind him and out of his angle of view, for once it was he who would surprise him ducking out of a conference. Paul was a friend of Kate, she had introduced him at to Fitznorman at a conference in Paris on dating methods for antique ceramics, it was Anne-Marie’s speciality, his wife, as for Paul he was head of genetic research at Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology in Paris.
Fitznorman had always enjoyed the company of the bad boys of the class, and Paul, in spite of his academic achievements, was just that, always agitated, looking for something to amuse him, he was one of the most extrovert persons Fitznorman had ever met, unable to exist without being surrounded by noisy talkative friends and who loved the kind of jocular exchange that he was engaged in at that very moment with a total stranger.
Cathary was internationally renowned for his research in the field of human evolution. He had spent his life searching for a hidden message in the genes of man and his ancestors, a subject of little other than general interest to Fitznorman, until his discovery in Sarawak.
‘So this is where French research finds the answers?’
Paul turned around and presented the sparkling lamp as though Fitznorman had been at his side all of the time.
‘What do you think? Jolie non!’
‘How are you Paul? Dodging off the conference!’
‘Ça me fais chier! It’s more interesting here.’
‘Let’s go and get a glass of glühwein, look there’s a bar over there.’
They paid for two glasses of hot spiced wine from an open air bar and watched the Christmas crowd milling amongst the rows of small kiosks.
‘So Scott, how’s Indonesia,’ he said knowingly, ‘you’ve really put the cat among the pigeons.’
‘Don’t forget it’s extremely confidential,’ said Fitznorman in a worried tone.
‘Don’t worry about me, don’t forget it was us who dug out the DNA from your specimen, remember I’m also a government employee – bound by secrecy!’ he said laughing at Fitznorman’s discomfort.
‘I’ll be going back to Malaysia with Lundy, we’re planning to put together a team to carry out the archaeological exploration work on the site.’
‘Great, you can always come to me directly if you want any help,’ he said slipping his arm around his friends shoulder as if to console him.
‘I will, if we could learn more from the DNA then it would be fantastic. Is that possible?’
‘Well if our analysis is exact and the bones are really only three thousand years old it could be possible.’
‘That’s what the Carbon 14 tests say.’
They drank their wine, then took a taxi to the conference centre.
‘I’ve read in the programme that you’re giving a paper on human genetics in evolution.’
‘That’s right, are you familiar with the subject.’
‘No, you know my business is antiques, the only scientific things I know a little about are dating methods…for inorganics!’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s what I’m here for, to learn a little more. I’m on my way to Zurich, so I thought I’d stop by. Lundy had told me about the conference, he sent me the programme, that’s when I saw your name. If you’ve got time you can educate me a little on genetics and evolution.’
‘Of course,’ he said putting his arm around his friend’s shoulder, ‘it’s complicated, but I’ll give you some general background stuff.’
At the Palais des Expositions, the conference delegates were returning to the auditorium. The atmosphere was serious, bearded men holding sheaves of papers, talking in low voices, moving slowly.
‘Let’s sit over there,’ said Paul pointing to the coffee shop.
‘So tell me something about genetics then.’
‘Well, as you probably know there’s a lot of scientific discussion on the forces driving mutation, what we know, in simple terms, is that nature provides survival opportunities to life in response to a specific need, or even the absence of that need.’
‘The survival of the fittest!’
‘If you like, in any case Darwin and all evolutionists based their theories on the idea that haphazard mutations are the cause of the changes in species. That means random mutations are propitious at a given moment for the survival of a species, allowing it to procreate and perpetuate its genes and in doing so carrying the mutation onto the next generation. So in two million years, that’s about one hundred thousand generations, genes have been modified randomly to transform Lucy into men like us.’
‘So in simple terms does that mean that animals, or their genes, can take into account changes in their habitat?’
‘Yes, basically speaking, when this occurs in populations that are totally isolated in space and time. There’s the classical case that Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands.’
‘Bird’s beaks and all that.’
‘Yes, another example can be seen in the need to adapt teeth, from eating a diet of soft leaves to a diet of hard leaves, as climate changes and new types of vegetation moves in. Then the modification of the genes in one individual could survive in small isolated populations of say twenty or thirty individuals, that is if the modification is favourable to survival in new conditions.’
‘So that means evolutionary changes are the result of changes in the habitat due to variations in the climate, or for example competition in a niche. So what happens if the habitat remains unchanged?’
‘That’s a good question, over the almost two million years in the existence of Homo erectus there were few changes, what I mean are significant changes, on the other hand there were many swings in the climate. But even in stable conditions random mutations still occur, these are errors in the transmission of genes, which we know occur at a constant rate. A few of those mutations, those that were favourable, would have been retained, as I said in small isolated populations for example.’
‘And the bad ones?’
‘They’re rejected, as well as most of the favourable ones, it’s like a lottery, there’s only a few winners!’
‘If I’ve got it right then, changes particular to one individual could be transmitted to a family, or a group, providing them with a chance to survive changes in their habitat.’
‘That’s about it.’
‘So you could say that we evolved in response to slow changes in our habitat.’
‘Yes, as I mentioned the last two million years represents about one hundred thousand generations, in this period of time perhaps a total of one billion individuals had lived, that gives considerable possibilities for the survival of random mutations.’
‘So what exactly is the mechanism of this process?’
‘That’s where DNA comes in, deoxyribonucleic acid, it’s the code that programmes every living organism on this earth. Every single cell in our body contains a string of DNA. Imagine this string about one metre long coiled into a ball of about five microns in diameter in the nucleus of our cells. A double strand that forms the famous double helix.’
‘And what’s DNA made of?’
‘Very simple, carbon compounds that form proteins.’
‘Proteins, like in cornflakes,’ Fitznorman commented dryly.
Paul ignored the pleasantry, genetics was the only thing he took seriously in life.
‘This code controls the growth and multiplication of every cell, from conception to the adult form in every single living creature during its whole existence. It’s been transmitted from generation to generation ever since life appeared on our planet, mutating from single cells to complex animals, such as ourselves. Some of us have difficulty in believing we descended from some kind of prehistoric ape, well try this on for size, each and every one of us is the descendant of some primeval form of life, a blob that existed in the slime formed at the dawn of time. Stop for a moment! Try to imagine that!’
Fitznorman looked blank for an instant. ‘Can DNA be extracted from very old fossils?’
‘Yes, we are working on that at the moment. The oldest DNA ever found comes from Siberia, fragments from plants, fungi, and animals, found in 350,000 year old permafrost soil cores.
‘Personally I think that under very special circumstances it might be possible to get small fragments of DNA in human and animal bones that are up to a million years old. This could be used to solve the family connections of our extinct relatives, something that paleoanthropologists are always arguing about. However, there is not much hope for the fossils found in Java, as DNA degrades rapidly in hot climates.
‘We’ve been working on fossilized human dejections, that’s shit to you Scott,’ they both laughed, ‘seriously if you could find some erectus faeces – coprolites, on your site that might provide some answers about their language capacity. As a matter of fact some of us hope to use fossil coprolites from Israel.’
‘Israel?’
‘Yes, in the caves of Mount Carmel, near Haifa, where several Neanderthal fossils have been found. Certain genes could indicate speech development and we think this was present in men about 50,000 years ago.’
‘So DNA from Israel might prove whether Neanderthals could speak?’
‘Might prove!’
I see.’
‘Anyway, DNA code is transmitted to our children and to all future generations and will continue to be as long as man continues and evolves into some future being.’
‘If we don’t destroy ourselves in the meantime.’
The next morning Fitznorman picked-up a rental car and drove to Zurich were he’d fixed a meeting with a certain Jimmy Fogg to settle another business.
He dropped the car off at Kloten Airport and took a taxi to the Central Bahnhof. There he found Jimmy looking a little lost, standing outside of the left luggage office in the basement level of the railway station. It was too early for lunch and they decided to take a walk and have a beer in one of the bars by the river. They made their way out of the station sliding between the construction works that seem to have surrounded the station for an eternity.
The traffic was dense and slow moving and in spite of strict emission controls Zurich seemed to be just as polluted as London or Paris. They crossed the bridge and strolled along the northern bank of the river until reaching the head of the lake, then crossed back to the south side where they stopped at a biergarten overlooking the river.
They ordered two beers and relaxed to watch Zurich life through the biergarten window struggling in a traffic snarl on the bridge, a mixture of trams, cars and two wheelers. Jimmy, who never felt at ease surrounded by people speaking foreign languages, seemed to be happier now that he had found a friend.
‘Listen Jimmy I want you to do something for me,’ Fitznorman said, ‘very discretely.’
‘I’m all ears,’ Jimmy replied perking up.
‘Some friends of mine have lost something and they need it back.’
‘You know I’m into anything funny,’ he said looking at Fitznorman with a disappointed expression.
‘No, of course not Jimmy, it’s nothing to do with you, I need you to do me this favour.’
Jimmy was an Eastender and a well known London antique dealer…reputed for his links to the shadier side of the business.
‘Okay then, I’m listening,’ he said his ruffled feathers settling down.
‘It’s a skull…’
‘A skull, I hope the poor bastard wasn’t murdered!’
‘No, it’s a very old skull that was illegally exported from Indonesia a few years ago. They want it back and there’s rumours that it’s resurfaced again.’
‘Okay, give me the details and I’ll see what I can do.’
A couple of hours later Fitznorman, in the company of Jimmy Fogg, was back at Kloten Airport, where Swiss efficiency still seemed to be present, and quickly checked-in. In the departure lounge he idly watched from his seat in the bar as the Jimmy made the ritual purchase of duty frees. It was not as if he was short of money, but he told Fitznorman that only in Zurich could such good cigars be found.
The airport was not busy, it was the nearing the year end holiday, still another couple of weeks before the rush started. The odd assorted group of Japanese or British bankers exchanged their usual stories with fellow travellers, boasting of everlasting lunches and dinners with the top people.
Fitznorman boarded the Swissair flight and took his seat in business class. He was pleasing to see it was more than half empty and he settled back to a smooth flight and a light meal as the plane headed east towards Vienna in clear weather.
‘Good!’ exclaimed Lundy, ‘We have to figure just how we are going to handle this. I can’t just put a team together like that and disappear off to the jungles of Malaysia or Indonesia. I have a board of directors and trustees with no budget for such an expedition. We’ll have to inform the Ministry of Culture and Science. They will want me to inform Foreign Affairs. We have to fix it up with the governments of both countries.’
‘Both countries!’
‘I mean France and Indonesia. What about Aris by the way?’
‘I’ve spoken with him. We’re practically one hundred percent certain the site is on the Indonesian side of the border and he’s willing to back the local part of the expedition in Indonesia and to arrange things with their authorities.’
‘Excellent.’
‘What about the reaction of the Malaysians.’
‘That I don’t know. I have some good contacts in Kuala Lumpur, but they’re strange sods, you never know how to take them. They’re not at ease with themselves, you know Mahatir, their prime minister and all that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well the Indonesians are uncomplexed, they fought for their independence, plus the fact they don’t have any difficulties with a large ethnic Chinese population as Malaysia does, they’re easy about their religion, Islam. What I mean is that they are more mature, colonisation is very far behind them.’
‘What about the Chinese in Indonesia?’
‘They don’t even represent five percent of the population, though they count from the economical point of view, but otherwise have no weight. Indonesia is a large potentially powerful country in the region with a population of well over two hundred million and they’re practically all Muslims. On the other hand the Malaysians are a tenth of that, and the so called Bumiputras, sons of the soil, are barely a majority in their own country, on top of that not all Malaysians are Muslims by a long way. There are Chinese, Indians and all the non-Malay peoples of Malaysian Borneo, some of whom are Christians, who all in all make up not far off fifty percent of the country’s population.’
‘How does that affect us?’
‘Unfortunately, the Malaysian government and administration are control freaks, they think anything they don’t control is against them, and if they don’t control something then the last thing they want is foreigners doing it for them.’
‘I see,’ he said pensively.
‘Let’s hope Aris is right and the site is in Indonesia.’
‘He said he’s sure about the entrance to the cave.’
‘Well we can always dig a hole from the other side.’
‘What! And meet the Malaysian border patrol halfway down the tunnel.’
‘Look, I think Aris can handle the Indonesian part, but we don’t have to get mired down in that now. How will you handle your side?’
‘First I’ll call a meeting of the board and trustees, and ask you to make a presentation.’
That Friday afternoon the board of the Musée de l’Homme was convened in Lundy’s offices. It consisted of a small group of venerable scientists, trustees and administrators. They were from the CNRS (The National Centre for Scientific Research), The Institute of Human Palaeontology, The Museum of Natural History and the representative of the Ministry.
They were seated around the large conference table, whispering, curious to learn the reasons why Lundy had called an urgent meeting and the air of mystery surrounding it.
‘Gentlemen, I have called this board meeting today on a matter of great scientific importance. A discovery has been made that could possibly revolutionise our ideas about human evolution.’
There was a moment of barely hidden agitation and excitement as the board members seated around the table looked at each other and at Lundy.
‘Please,’ he said smiling and lifting his hands for calm.
‘The discovery has been made by a certain Scott Fitznorman, a renowned Parisian collector of Asian art and artefacts. He is waiting outside and with your permission I will call him in to present his discovery.’
They nodded in agreement, eager to get to the essential, although it was not exactly usual to invite a stranger, a foreigner at that, to one of their board meetings.
Fitznorman took a place at the end of the table and introduced himself and then placed a resin mould of the calvarium before him.
There was a silence.
‘Gentlemen, this calvarium was found in a cave in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat, near to the border of Malaysian Sarawak, both of which are on the island of Borneo, for those of you who may not be too familiar with the region.’
It was true that Borneo was not exactly the centre of human palaeoanthropology. Traces of Neolithic man had been discovered in the Niah caves in the north of Sarawak, but nothing of any really great significance.
Lundy then took over.
‘You may examine this calvarium in a moment, it is a resin mould of course, the original is locked in our safe,’ he said pointing behind, ‘but first I will give you the results of some tests that we have taken the liberty to have had carried out.’
The members of the board looked with strained curiosity, trying to get a better view of the skull fragment. It was not evident from a distance of one or two metres, depending on where the observer was seated, to see the details.
‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Michel Corbet with a smile, one of the scientific administrators of the museum. ‘What is it then? A cousin of Java man, a two million year old ancestor?’
‘Well you’re wrong on two counts, both of which I am certain. One it’s not Java man’s cousin...’
They all laughed.
‘...and second it’s not two million years old...it’s two thousand years old.’
‘Two thousand...’ came a puzzled echo.
‘Yes, two to three thousand years old to be more precise...and it’s of the species Homo erectus.’
An undignified bedlam broke out as the men rose to their feet in a single movement, leaning over the table towards the resin mould.
‘Gentlemen please, please, in a moment we’ll pass it around, but let us behave like scientists.’
There were astonished and disbelieving remarks and questions flew in all directions.
‘What do these tests show?” asked a director of the Palaeontological Laboratory at the CNRS.
‘Radiocarbon tests shows a date of between two and three thousand years, and the DNA we have been able to extract indicates that it’s no known living man or ape.’
They sat down, the shock was clear, putting into question whole lifetimes of research and scientific theory.’
‘How could this happen?’ an elderly scientist asked.
‘That we don’t know.’
Fitznorman described the circumstances of the find and how they had returned to the site. The man from the Ministry, Philippe Poiget, an overly self-important man in his early forties, gave a slight frown of disapproval. Lundy ignored him and went on to the main questions of how they would proceed, how to handle the news and most importantly how to put together a budget for an extensive expedition.
‘Professor,’ said the Poiget putting on his authoritative voice. ‘If this bone was found in Indonesian, aren’t we in the obligation to hand it over to the Indonesians.’
‘That’s a possibility,’ Lundy said softly with a slight smile, ‘but let us remember that this ‘bone’ here is on loan to us from Mr Fitznorman. Who I would remind you is a British citizen.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘This is probably one of the most startling discoveries of the century and I think it is in the interest of French science and anthropological research to back this opportunity,’ continued Lundy, ‘we wouldn’t like to see it go across the Channel, would we?’
Lundy looked at Poiget, who was thinking of his own career and the consequences of handing an important discovery over to the British Natural History Museum.
‘No, of course not,’ he sniffed.
The other board members smiled at the discomfort of Poiget, pleased that they had won a skirmish for once.
‘I propose that we name this specimen Homo borneensis,’ said Lundy changing the subject. ‘For our non-specialists members,’ he said smiling in the direction of Poiget, who gave an embarrassed sniff, ‘that means Homo borneensis is a member of the family Hominidae, the genus Homo and the species borneensis.’
As Fitznorman looked a little puzzled, then Lundy stood up and walked to the wall board behind him and quickly wrote,
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: Homo borneensis
‘There we are Scott, according to the system developed by Carl Linnaeus, the Father of Taxonomy, for naming, ranking, and classifying all plants and creatures,’ he said smiling. ‘The exact criterion for membership in the Homininae is not clear, but usually includes the species that share more than 97% of their DNA with the modern human genome, and requires the capacity for language, and, having a simple culture beyond the family or group.’
‘So it’s a primate like a chimpanzee.’
‘No, not exactly, it’s a question of the mind, the theory of minds, the capacity to lie convincingly, and language’ he said more seriously, ‘these controversial criteria distinguish the adult human amongst other hominids. We acquire that capacity at about four and a half years of age in our cultures, whereas the bonobo, gorilla and chimpanzee never seem to develop this. However, we don’t really know whether early members of the Homininae, such as australopithecines, Homo erectus, or Homo neanderthalensis, had that kind of mind, but it’s illogical to ignore similarities seen in living cousins. So, despite an apparent lack of real culture, plus significant physiological differences, some think that the orangutan may also satisfy these criteria.’
‘I see,’ said Fitznorman, not sure that he really did.
‘Does that mean that you are announcing a new species?’ asked Corbet raising a hand, showing a gold bracelet on his wrist.
‘Not for the moment, this is strictly between ourselves to avoid confusion. Of course if there are any other suggestions….’
The members of the board gave nods of approval and Lundy started to describe the organisation for the expedition and costs.
‘We have an influential Indonesian industrialist, a close friend of Mr Fitznorman, who has already been of considerable assistance, and who is prepared to cover all local costs. What we need now is a team be put together to undertake the expedition, with a budget and obeying the utmost secrecy. However, I regret to say that whilst it is desirable that secrecy should be maintained as long as possible, it will not last long. The more people involved, the greater the risk of a premature