Uneasy Relations Read Online Free PDF Page B

traits were. Anyway, the truth is, I was more excited about the pathology on the female’s skeleton. That was something you could hang your hat on. The earliest known case of ankylosing spondylitis in a human being. Until Gibraltar Woman, the first case we knew about was from the Egyptian Neolithic, a good fifteen thousand years later!”
    “I remember how excited about that you were.” She smiled. “I can see how excited you are about it
now
. And wasn’t there some graduate student somewhere who was going to do her dissertation on it?”
    “Yes, from Cal, I think. She contacted me a year or so after Europa Point. She was pretty sure she’d run across another case of it from about the same time period, at some little site in Portugal, or was it Spain? Spain, I think. She thought there might be a dissertation topic there, on genetic anomalies among early modern humans.”
    “And was there?”
    “I don’t know. She e-mailed me a couple of times with questions and then I never heard from her again. Which probably means there wasn’t. Maybe the case she’d come across wasn’t ankylosing spondylitis after all; maybe it was just advanced arthritis and she hadn’t been able to tell the difference on her own. She probably found something else to work on.”
    “Well, the runway’s clear, folks,” the captain announced. “We’re on our way in.”
    There was scattered applause, and then, after a thoughtful pause, Julie said, “Gideon, back to the hybrid issue, what about those specific traits you mentioned? That space behind the molars, that mandibular foramen thing? Did Gibraltar Boy have them or didn’t he?”
    “Moot point. The jawbone’s missing. They’re both partial skeletons, remember, and pretty banged up at that.”
    “Okay, what about DNA? Wouldn’t that tell if he was human, or Neanderthal, or a mix?”
    “No DNA. It’s always pretty iffy with things that old. In this case the bones have lost too much collagen for a reliable test.”
    “So I guess we’ll never know for sure.”
    “I guess we won’t.” He smiled. “I can live with it. There are more important things to worry about.”
     
FOUR
     
    “THE Rock itself,” said the donnish-looking, donnish-sounding gentleman to his huddled audience of four men and three women, “on the very crest of which we now stand, is, as most of you already know, not really a ‘rock’ in the sense of a single giant monolith, but a narrow, limestone spine running north-south for approximately, ah, mmm, three miles. The famous massive, perpendicular aspect that we know from photographs is simply its northern terminus. Now, to the west, behind us, it slopes less precipitously down to Gibraltar town, which you can see spread out approximately thirteen hundred feet below us — or rather four hundred
meters
, as the lords of Brussels now decree that I must say, ah-ha-ha.”
    Donnish he might be, but in fact he was the only member of the group, other than Julie Oliver, who was not a teacher. Rowley G. Boyd, MA (Oxon), Gideon’s soon-to-be fellow author in Javelin’s Frontiers of Science series, was the director of the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology. It was the museum that had arranged this visit to the Rock (including a complimentary three-course lunch) for this group of five scholars and two spouses who had arrived a day early for the Paleoanthropological Society conference, so as to be able to participate in this evening’s symposium for Ivan Gunderson. Rowley had thought that the distinguished assemblage would appreciate a recreational outing to the top of Gibraltar’s celebrated monolith, even though several had been there before. Part of the treat was to have been the breathtaking ride up by cable car, but they’d had to drive up in a stuffy, uncomfortable taxi van instead because the cable was shut down today on account of the strong winds at the top.
    Which was also the reason that Rowley’s audience was huddled so tightly.
    “Now