The Covenant of Genesis Read Online Free PDF

called GLUG, for Global Levels of Underwater Geology - its full name contrived after the developers had come up with the jokey acronym. Using the most up-to-date radar and sonar maps, the program allowed members of the IHA and its sister agencies to see the topography of the entire planet, above or below the waves, with an accuracy previously only available to the best-equipped militaries. But GLUG could do more than simply show things as they were in the present: using data gleaned from geological and ice-core surveys, it could also raise or lower the sea level on a map to match that at any point in the past . . . or, by a simple reversal of the algorithm, list all the times when the sea had been at a specified level.
    Which Nina had done. ‘This is what Indonesia looked like when the sea level was ninety-eight feet lower,’ she said. As Chase watched, the map changed, new islands springing up around the coast. She pointed at a yellow marker on the edge of one of the freshly revealed land masses. ‘See? That’s the dig site, right on the coast - sixty thousand years ago.’
    Chase scratched at his thinning, close-cropped hair. ‘So? I thought that’s exactly what you were trying to prove, that early humans spread along the coastlines way back when. The whole Palaeolithic migration hypothesis thing.’
    Nina gave him a surprised smile. ‘You’ve been reading my research?’
    ‘Hey, I don’t spend all my spare time watching action movies. Okay, so sixty thousand years ago, Ig and Ook used to live here, catching fish and making bricks. Isn’t that what you expected to find?’
    ‘More or less - except for that .’ She lifted the brick. ‘You know when the earliest known bricks date from?’
    ‘A week last Tuesday?’
    She smiled. ‘Not quite. The earliest known fired bricks were found in Egypt, and dated from around three thousand BC. Even plain mud bricks only date from at most eight thousand BC. Kind of a gap between that and fifty -eight thousand BC.’
    ‘What if it’s more recent? Maybe it fell off a ship.’
    ‘You saw how rounded the exposed parts of the other bricks were. That’s not centuries of erosion, that’s millennia.’ She turned the anachronistic object over in her hands. Though battered, its surface still retained the vestiges of a glaze, suggesting a relatively advanced and aesthetically concerned maker. Neither concept fitted well with a Palaeolithic origin.
    She put down the brick. ‘I think we need to expand the survey parameters.’
    Chase raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, you do, do you?’
    ‘Hey, I’m the Director of the IHA. It’s my job to decide these things.’
    ‘ Interim Director,’ Chase reminded her. Nina had assumed the role four months earlier, following the death of her predecessor Hector Amoros, and the UN’s decision on the permanency of her appointment was pending. But it was a lock, she was sure; not bad for someone who had only turned thirty that year.
    ‘Whatever. But I still think we should do it. Proving a theory is one thing, but making a discovery that could change everything we thought about early man . . .’
    Chase stepped behind her and wrapped his thick arms round her waist. ‘You just want to be on the cover of Time again, don’t you?’
    ‘No. Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But just think about what it would mean! Current theory believes that Homo sapiens didn’t develop anything but the most basic stone tools until the upper Palaeolithic period fifty thousand years ago, but if they had kilns able to bake bricks . . .’ She tailed off as Chase’s hands made their way up to her breasts. ‘Eddie, what are you doing?’
    ‘You get so turned on when you’re talking about archaeology,’ he said, a gap-toothed, lecherous smirk on his square face. ‘It’s like your version of porn. Your nipples pop up like grapes.’
    ‘I do not have grape nipples,’ Nina told him in a faux-frosty tone.
    ‘Well, they’re still nice and tasty. We could just nip -