It was one of those days. First, Tony did not like the title of this blog. He toyed with a number of alternatives, including naming a few of the giant mammals that went extinct between ten and twenty thousand years ago.
This was the time frame that was to provide one of the threads in his story. Many remember this as the phase of the last ice age of the planet. It may well be that the earth was losing some of its ice coverings, while at the same time early humans were getting more adept at exploring hitherto uninhabited regions of the world. His maternal lineage was probably moving along the Eurasian landmass at this time, as revealed by reports of the analysis done on his mitochondrial DNA.
And Tony was trying to write up on this imaginary trail of an ancestral female that morphed from generation to generation, moving from one era and landscape through to the next, till they come into historical times, and the scene gets fuzzy. Clarity was to come as the second thread of the story, of a young Indian engineer meets up with his past. The story is not supposed to end there. The mitochondria that he carried would not be passed to the next generation. Only females did that. But he had sisters, and the line would continue, at least in the foreseeable future, onto a few more generations.
But, meanwhile, he was to weld the past with the present, which involved a Canadian woman, or perhaps two. Tony scratched his head and went back to constructing a scene that involved either a mammoth, or a saber tooth cat, or perhaps a shivatherium, that would confront an elderly woman in the central asian steppes.
American Lion - wikipedia
The woman in question would likely be separated from her clan during a hunting expedition that went wrong. While her immediate clan remained two hundred yards away, a group of the giant mammals, angry and afraid, were preparing to make a last stand against the spear throwing humans, when they chanced upon the woman.
There were a few things that was special about this woman – who was called Suta by her clan. She had, on an earlier blog, represented as a small girl sleeping in a cave during a winter storm. Now she was old. She carried a piece of mitochondrial DNA that was to pass on its copies down thousands of years all the way to Sunil Dustidar, or Neil Dusty, of British Columbia, Canada, in the year 2012.
But she was not alone. She had with her a kid – a small daughter, huddling wide eyed behind her, as she crouched, holding a piece of stone, and hissing at the approaching animal.
In the story, she would end up sacrificing herself, and injuring the animal enough to let her small daughter dash for her life, to the security of the rest of her clan – running the gauntlet of hostile animals in the central asian steppes, her tiny feet making small tracks on the wet snow as she dashed between rocks and ran, crouching. She was barely five years old, but was an expert runner and tree climber. She was hoping to reach the line of young fir trees beyond the gully ahead of her, surprising a group of giant rodents that were a cross between rabbits and skunks.
Meanwhile, the old woman, Suta, had been gored, or bitten, by the animal that felt trapped by the hunting humans on one side, and the stone throwing woman on the other. Tony could not decide what animal it should be. A saber toothed cat would likely bite her somewhere. He remembered reading somewhere that a human skull bore puncture marks of a saber toothed cat. But biting a skull appeared to be a bad way or attaching a human. The puncture marks might have been after the human had died. Perhaps the skull had rolled out into a stream bed and the cat was trying to crack the skull to get as the rotting brain.
But in the cast of Suta, an attacking carnivore should use the most economical and efficient way to kill a prey. A bit at the neck? Or stomach ? In the story, the animal would attack the woman partially as self defense. And the woman would ensure that the animal’s attention remained on her, thus allowing her baby to escape to safety. And while all this was going on, her own clan were frantically yelling and grunting, and throwing spears. Tony did not know how good the clan would have been in handling fires. Could it be that they learned the tricks of wrapping dry reeds or wine around the spear handle, soaked in animal fat or bitumen, and light a fire before throwing those burning lances ?
Such a tactic might not be any better than throwing a spear with a sharp stone at the front designed to pierce the skin and embed deep into the prey. But it might have the psychological effect of panicking the animals into irrational behavior and coax them out of their corners and into the open. It might also scare them away from attacking Suta and her baby.
If not saber toothed cats, it would be mammoths. It could be cave lions of Eurasia. It could be a sivatherium. When it came to saber teethed cat or cave lions, Tony felt unsure than a hunting party of late pleistocene humans would attach a predator of that kind. Also, it was almost certain that predators did not move in large herds, and would more likely to ambush the humans rather than humans ambushing them. So, a predator could be accidentally caught in the cross fire between the hunting party, and the giant herbivores.
Straight-tusked Elephant - wikipedia
If not mammoths, a sivatherium provided an attractive alternative. A giant giraffe like animal with multiple horns on its head and a mouth that might have resembled a modern tepir – this animal carried the improbable name of a hindu God. Why it carried shiva in its name, Tony was not sure – but such a name and an animal might add variety. Cornered and injured, it was massive enough to attack and gore a single wild haired human, especially an elderly woman wearing animal skin and brandishing small stones.
In the other half of the story – Neil was trying to piece together the thread of his ancestral lineage. Since the last blog, several things had happened. He had ended up sleeping with Mabel a few times a week, and stopped feeling awkward about it. His initial hesitation, because of the difference in age, as well as the perception of race, had not completely vanished, but were no more troubling him. Man was a creature of habit, and had a habit of getting used to things. Mabel certainly brought a degree of thrill and happiness that was missing in his life. She looked positively radiant some of the time, and very pleased with herself in general.
Neil guessed they were sort of dating each other, and were kind of paired up. His idea of dating normally involved taking a woman out for an evening of eating, or drinking, or watching a movie or something. But Neil had done none of those. If they went out together, more often than not in involved walking around in sandy shores or among thick vegetation in some nature park. Neil would normally be hauling a heavy camera and lens mounted on a tripod – the whole contraption balanced on his shoulder as he moved. Mabel would also have a backpack with additional photography gear of Neil. But lately she started adding sandwiches, fruit juice, water, and even a birders field guide to her pack. Neil did not like carrying field guides, but refer to them later, back in his car, or back home. But Mabel wanted to catch up on the general identification of birds. She was soon to learn the difference between different kinds of swifts, martins and swallows, or gulls, or birds of prey, and waders.
She loved spending time with Neil, and Neil was getting used to having another person with him on his days of bird watching.
There was going to be complications coming into the cozy relationship developing between Neil and Mabel. They were not aware of it yet.
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Cave Paintings of ice age eurasian animals - wikipedia
The story was soon going to have some sort of a triangle. There needed to be either another woman, or another man or both. Tony was more inclined to create another woman, a single mother with a child. He even named her Karen.
Two months ago, Tony did not have a clue on the plot for the story. But that was two months ago.
Tony stopped typing and put away the laptop for a while. He was hungry. He spent the last few hours walking about in the Galleria mall in Houston and move through the stores of Macy, Sacks fifth avenue, Sony, Apple, and a number of others, without finding a single thing he wanted to buy. The closest he came to purchasing anything was a half sleeve white sweater in Macy. But they had small sizes and extra large but no Large size, which was the right size for him. Just as well, he really did not need a white half sleeve sweater, even if it looked nice.
Why he was there? Well, he had finished his work ahead of time, and instead of returning home to Vancouver on Sunday, he tried to rebook his flight a day earlier, but failed. So, he essentially had a day to spare. He decided against going out to the art galleries, or the nature parks, or search out some friends there. The walk in the mall was more to do with stretching his legs and getting some exercise.
Sitting near the fountain inside the mall, he had read up two newspapers, the Financial Time, and Houston Chronicle. He was unimpressed by the trivia but liked a few articles, especially in the pink Financial Times.
Papers had their share of news about the fighting republican candidates that wishes to challenge Obama in the coming presidential election. He found the news mostly boring, and also silly.
Nobody discussed real politics, or real economics, or real anything anymore.He had left the papers and moved on. Perhaps another shopper would find a better use for them.
He had stopped at a spot where baby dogs were on sale for potential pet owners. The dog pups were a hit among young children. There were no price tags, so Tony did not know how much they cost.
Back to the hotel, which was across the street from the entrance to the mall, Tony had sat at the bar and had a beer, trying to watch a basketball game on the wide flatscreen TV there. Unimpressed, he came up and started writing about Suta and her sacrifice.
The item had a link with his own immediate ancestry, going back a few hundred years. He had learned, from his father and his uncle, that their ancestors had one deformed male that actually grew to adulthood and produced off springs that made it possible for the lineage to continue.
But the deformation was not from birth. As a child, he was apparently attacked by a tiger in what is today Bangladesh. His mother, a tiny sari clad woman, had chased and attacked the tiger holding a sort of machete. The tiger, or perhaps it was a tigress, got furious, dropped the bleeding child and grabbed the mother, killing and dragging her off to the marshes. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of her baby. That baby, now deformed for life, survived. Tony had heard of that story, from his own father and his fathers elder brother.
That was linked to his paternal ancestry. But in the story he was writing, he decided to attach a similar incidence, pushing it back to the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, and moved it from his paternal, to his maternal ancestry.
But now, it was time for a hearty meal. Tony decided to walk back into the mall. He had seen a nice restaurant and bar that was better than the coffee shop in the hotel. He was planning to have a glass of wine, a very large salad, and perhaps a cheese cake.
He put put on his wind cheater, took his iPad, and walked out of the hotel, mulling about a saber toothed tiger, a four tusked mammoth, and a shivatherium, and how a tiny woman might sacrifice herself to save her daughter, thus allowing her mitochondrial DNA to survive through another ten thousand years all the way to the present.