Habilis

EXHIBIT: OLDUVAI HOMINID 7

Here we have the type specimen of the species Homo habilis, earliest member of the genus Homo. Also known as OH 7, this specimen consists of a fragmented lower mandible with thirteen teeth, isolated maxillary molar, two parietal bones, and twenty-one finger, hand, and wrist bones. He is a boy. Twelve. Maybe thirteen. Look closely and you’ll see the Serengeti sunrise, grasses bloodied with light, the naked child running across plain. He chases an egret, wings sheer against a pink shock of sky. He lifts his face, follows the bird until it dissolves into light. The sun is mounting. He closes his eyes against its brightness but leaves his face still lifted, lets his eyelids warm. Then some clockwork inside of him says, Time to go home. So home he goes, back across the plain, down the ravine near the river. He has come this way many times, the land knows his footfalls, but today, somehow, is different. Perhaps he loses his footing down the steep side of the ravine. Perhaps he is startled by a wildcat, its teeth jutting like icicles over lip. Or perhaps who knows, but somehow, today, the boy dies. He dies and his family comes looking, and over his body his mother keens, moans, bellows a wordless loss into the air. A cloud of swallows startles from a nearby tree, flits away like a puff of smoke. The family does not bury their child, such rites do not exist, but they move his body off, away from where they live and eat and flake stones into tools. And the body lies there in the soil, let’s say next to a patch of African violets, why not, and his flesh rots off, nails and teeth loosen and drop, organs turn to liquid, he stinks. Eventually all the soft tissue is gone, leaving just skeleton behind, the bones disarticulated, untouching, the body no longer bound by ligament and sinew, and finally the bones too begin to go, the acidic soil making a slow meal of them, until at some point, let’s say fortuitously, a volcano twenty miles from the ravine erupts, soaks the earth in soft hot ash, and this happens again and again over the millennia, and though most of the boy’s skeleton dissolves to dust, certain parts are preserved: a mandible with thirteen teeth, an isolated molar, two parietal bones, twenty-one finger, hand, and wrist bones. And these bones stay packed in their volcanic ash for ages, until, let’s say miraculously, a team of researchers cuts into the earth and, so slowly, with such care, reveals the boy’s old bones. They pull him from the earth at last, once again under the Serengeti sun, and they call him OH 7, Olduvai Hominid 7, and estimate he would have had a brain size of 663 cubic centimeters, had he lived to maturity, and they name him the type specimen of a brand-new species, habilis, Homo habilis, handy man. They touch his mandible with gloved fingers and imagine his life, his death, imagine their DNA spiraling back toward him, across this gulf of time.

The woman’s name is Lucy. She has drained her martini, smoked the last of her clove, and now watches the bodies dancing around her, their blue slick of sweat, silver fistfuls of disco light spangling skin. At the center of the floor the bodies merge and fuse, a silhouetted mass with a million limbs. Her friend, Dina, stirs a whiskey ginger and says, It’s radical I know, but we were facing bankruptcy. Plus, the bones were getting lonely. Lucy can feel the music beating in her pelvis. Her bones, humming like a bass drum. It was not an easy sell, let me tell you, says Dina. Our board of directors are practically fossils themselves. Dina is dressed in her red curator’s blazer and checkered black-and-white shorts, the long black mop of her hair pulled back into a thick ponytail. Blue light smears her cheek like oil paint, darkening in the recesses of her jawline, the curve of her nose. Come on, she says. Tosses back the last of her drink and grabs Lucy’s hand. Let’s dance.

EXHIBIT: ANTELOPE METAPODIAL BONE

One and a half million years old. Behind the glass, a soft and woody brown, eroded edges revealing a lattice of loam. Think back to when this bone was carcass. Wide gash in tawny fir, blood thick and dripping. The smell. Nearby, a dozen protohumans (male) lift their heads and catch the coppery whiff of meat. They follow it to its source and find the animal, newly dead and unclaimed, splayed and red and waiting. All that gorgeous meat, that creamy marrow. The protohumans’ pupils swell and saliva floods their mouths, but there are too many of them for this small corpse. And each one starts toward the prize, hands up and out — then stops. Looks around the circle of large dark eyes and sees desire mirrored everywhere. They pause, hands hanging, and think of what is about to happen, what has already happened so many times — the bashed skulls and shredded skin — and somewhere deep inside them, some quirk of DNA, some evolutionary adjustment whispers, Stop. And then the hands that lifted with the intention of grabbing, claiming, seizing, are instead only pointing — pointing to the carcass at their center. To point. To point is not to grasp. It is to say: This. This. This. To substitute gesture for meat, for marrow, for blood. To posit a mind not your own, a gaze not your own. It is to become, suddenly, human.

On the dance floor. The throb of light and sound. Time swells like a balloon, then pops, shrinks to a point. Bodies bodies bodies. Or just one body. One large body, lacking symmetry, lacking center, ecstatic, catatonic, pulsing. Her skin becomes his skin becomes your skin becomes mine. There is sweat on her lip and it tastes like a stranger. There are hands around her and they float without origin. Reach for them. Thread sweaty fingers together like tapestry. That space between fingers — it should have a name. For every finger, a corresponding negative space. We are like puzzle pieces, she thinks, she wants to believe. Around her, metacarpals and phalanges stretch and splay — long, loping, knobbly with knuckle. Prehensile: able to grasp or hold. But also: able to let go. Able to lose. Please hold your child’s hand. Her first girlfriend refused to hold her hand in public. They walked with fingers hanging in space, occasionally a brushed thumb. Please hold your child’s hand while entering or exiting the train. Hands are what is held, are what do the holding. A closed loop. Please. Please hold your child. Please hold your child’s hand.

Lucy looks for Dina in the throng. Finds her. Locks eyes on the nape of her neck.

EXHIBIT: LOWER PALEOLITHIC OLDOWAN TOOL SET

The oldest stone tools, used by Homo habilis and Homo ergaster. First discovered by anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Here you will see three different kinds of tool, though classification is fraught. Mary Leakey first sorted the tools into the following types: choppers, scrapers, and pounders. Subsequent taxonomists, however, objected to assuming use from manufacture. As such, new classifications include: flaked pieces, detached pieces, pounded pieces, unmodified pieces. The new classifications warn: you do not know these people. The flaked pieces whisper: imagination is a lie. Pounded pieces insist: nothing is universal.

Paleoanthropologists have repeatedly reconstructed the Oldowan tool-making process for academic purposes. Here’s how: strike a spherical hammerstone against the edge of a suitable core rock (preferably of quartz, basalt, obsidian, flint, or chert). You will find these rocks among river cobbles, where the water has washed them round and smooth and the size of your fist. You will collect them, perhaps, in the early dawn, before the sun is hot, while the wildebeest graze and the acacia trees drip with dew. You will turn them over and over in your newly dexterous fingers, feel the heft and grain, begin to imagine what shapes this stone could take. Then you will strike the core rock, again and again, producing a conchoidal fracture. The chip removed is called the flake. It will leave ripples in its wake, concentric curves that form a hollow — little obsidian pocket — the shape of absence. This process is called lithic reduction and illustrates the fact that what is lost always forms the boundary of what is.

Please hold your child’s hand while entering or exiting the train. The voice is robotic, female. The interior of the train stings bright as bleach. A child cries. Eighteen months old and the only passenger in this car. She wears pink boots, a winter coat far too large. She is standing on the gangway connector and with every turn in the tracks the floor rotates at her feet. She cannot keep her balance, skins her hands when she falls. The train rockets through the dark. A trajectory she will never remember.

In the body heat and beat of strobe, Lucy feels lightheaded. The bones don’t help — hollow sockets eyeless and gaping, cracked teeth jutting in gappy grins. She reaches for Dina’s arm. Skin hot slick. I’m going to the place with the sinks, she says. What? Dina shouts back. Lucy blinks. Puts a hand to her head. The bathroom, she says. I’m going. To the bathroom.

EXHIBIT: FORKHEAD BOX PROTEIN P2

Better known as FOXP2. Check out the shape of this thing — like the contents of a party cracker right after it’s pulled. So many intricate parts: zinc finger and leucine zipper, alpha helix and beta strands. Can you believe that these amino ribbons are what make language work? That this protein, hanging out on the q arm of chromosome seven, allows you to say, Could you pass the butter, please? And lo, the butter appears.

1987, West London. Seven cousins are all enrolled in the special education program at Brentford Primary School. The children’s speech is all wrong. Consonants dropped all over the place — book becomes ook, blue becomes bu. They stutter, too, words turning choppy and disrupted as their tongues hang forever on a single syllable, unable to pivot to the next. The mouth and tongue are normally so intelligent. Example: say the word happy. Before you have said anything, you will already be breathing out, you will have moved your tongue into position and opened your mouth in anticipation of the a. Then, even as you are hissing for h, the h will have something of the shape of an a, so that when you stop hissing, there it is, that round and ready vowel. And as soon as your mouth is fully open for a, you will already be closing it again, your lips meeting for p, and while your lips are together for p, your tongue is retreating to get ready for y, so that as you separate your lips in a tiny puff of air, the y is there, waiting to seal the word up. The whole thing takes less than half a second, even though pronouncing the vowels and consonants individually would take much longer. Time travel exists in these overlapping sounds, in this space between your lips.

But not for the seven cousins at Brentford Primary, and not for half their family, going back three generations or more. Their teacher, learning of this family history, calls up a geneticist at the Institute of Children’s Health, and the next thing the kids know they’re in a lab with blood pressure cuffs around their biceps and needles piercing the crooks of their arms. Fourteen years later, it’s confirmed: a language gene, one of several perhaps, but nonetheless we’ve found proof of this at least — that language is carried in our blood.

The bathrooms are soaked in blue. Indigo LED coming down in cones. Everything looks underwater and Lucy feels she may float upward like a bubble. Washing her hands, she looks in the mirror and jumps. Behind her, a female Homo habilis stares. Unblinking. Despite the soft pelt of her skin and long swing of her arms, Lucy knows her as kin. In the thick light they stare at each other. Fogged reflections, completely still.

EXHIBIT: MITOCHONDRIAL DNA, 10,000,000x MAGNIFICATION

Squint and you’ll see it. Faint smudge behind glass. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the mother, leading to the concept of Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent woman from whom all humans descend, linked to us through our mothers and our mothers’ mothers, a lineage of wombs, going back and back and back and back and back.

Back perhaps to this Homo habilis in the blue bathroom of the museum that is a discotheque. She and Lucy staring at each other in the mirror. Tap water running. Hands suspended over the sink. She wants to speak but how can she. And outside, Dina waits, throbbing with music and light, bourbon on her breath. Lucy shuts off the faucet with a squeak. Exits the bathroom and doesn’t look back.

EXHIBIT: CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

How to explain this mundane magic? All over the world, babes opening their mouths to form first words. Often, it is to name a desire. Mama. Juice. Or frequently: No. The name for desire that conflicts with another.

The poverty of the stimulus theory goes like this: every day, all over the world, sentences are spoken that have never been spoken before. From a limited number of examples, an unlimited number of speech acts. We must