She had a propane camp stove and a laundry line. There was a spigot, but no working plumbing. She seemed comfortable living in the sub-squalor of this creepy old château. She was a Zadiste, as she reminded me, a hard-core movement veteran, though she never said why she had left the ZAD. I imagined that her strong personality had been, as they say of such personalities, divisive.
One afternoon, as I dropped off two bags of groceries I’d purchased for her in Boulière, and she sorted through the bags bossily, as if I were her shopping assistant, she said, “There’s talk about you among them.”
Had my tryst with René been discovered? I quickly worked through the complications it might cause. He had a family who lived with him on the commune.
“Florence says you curry favor with Pascal’s inner circle and ignore everyone else. You need to be careful,” she said with a superior air. “Get acquainted with the people who do the actual work there.”
They didn’t know about René. I covered my relief with an expression of worry, and Nadia began advising me on how not to get purged, never mind that she herself had failed to avoid such a fate.
I left the abandoned château with a mental short list of the people Nadia named, whom I should get to know.
BRUNO SAID THAT AS SCIENTISTS were becoming more sophisticated at mapping ancient DNA, they were locating genomic traces of undiscovered people who had left their mark. These mysterious ancestors were called “ghost populations.”
We’ve found their genes in our genes, Bruno said, but we don’t yet know who these people were. We have not found traces of them in dig sites, neither their own bones nor the bones of what they ate.
What this means, Bruno said, is that we haven’t found their trash, and we will not name them and define them, they will stay “ghost,” until we do stumble upon their trash. But their trash might never be found.
Don’t underestimate the power of time to erase, he said. Much of life, and what matters most to a culture, consists of what a visual artist would deem “fragile materials”: Wood, say, and wax. Feathers, flowers, fish bones. Plants and unstable pigments. Ice. Emotions, and their transmission from one person to another. Blood, tears, tenderness, joy. Very little of what comprises culture can be found at a dig site. Stone can be found. And this, Bruno said, is the level of logic we are dealing with: the stones are all that is left, and so let’s call them stone age!
I don’t fault you—it’s not a character flaw that you’ve used this parlance in your email to me. (The Moulinards had sent him a question about “stone age technologies” as predictive, or not, of later and more destructive technologies.)
Rocks endure, Bruno said, and they give us this mistaken idea that human lives revolved around them, when it is merely that rocks are what is left. Which proves the tautology that durable things are durable, and not that ancient people were rock-centric, rock-focused, into rocks.
Let’s say a modern seafront village gets washed away by a tsunami, Bruno said, leaving crumbling concrete and twisted rebar as the only traces of the people who had been living there. The anthropologists come along, and they examine the remains of this tsunami-destroyed community and conclude that there had once flourished, in this washed-away place, a culture whose religious idols were concrete and rebar.
No culture can be understood, nor should be defined, by what doesn’t wash away. The durable traces, the rock or rebar, are real, but they are time-disfigured nubs, as strange and unrecognizable to the people who left them behind as they seem to us. We must learn to leave room for the rest, for the vast and vanished world of which durable traces form only a tiny part.
The old story about Thal, Bruno said, was that he hunted only slower terrestrial prey that was easy to catch. It was believed that the fastest-moving non-terrestrial creatures—birds and fish—were far beyond Thal’s grasp.
But over the last two decades, Bruno said, there has been new evidence that Neanderthals regularly caught corvids, pigeons, and choughs. Scientists conducted an experiment in Croatia to reproduce the Neanderthal conditions for night-hunting of choughs and found there was no “hunting” involved: the birds settle down for the evening in the nooks of a cave. The scientists went into the cave with headlamps and began picking up sleeping choughs and placing them in a basket. In their findings they reported that picking up these birds, one by one, was like picking apples from the low branches of an apple tree.
Bruno said that Italian scientists had just published a paper establishing that a cache of wing bones from corvids had been worked by Thals to remove their feathers. Ornithologists and behavior scientists at a cave in Gibraltar made a similar finding, that the wings of golden eagles, which offer little to no meat, had knife marks that were the result of feather removal, suggesting a decorative or perhaps religious use of such feathers. Thals, catching golden eagles! A creature with an eight-foot wingspan, whose talons and beaks are blades designed to shred and slice. An eagle was no apple you put in a basket. The scientists in Gibraltar speculated that Neanderthals made a blind in which to hide and wait, and set a trap of carrion, having learned the eagles’ seasonal and hunting patterns. Their theories challenged multiple stereotypes at once: that Thals did not hunt birds, that Thals did not have a sophisticated sense of seasons, and thus of time, and that Thals’ cognition was too basic for beliefs and rituals.
It had long been assumed that Thals did not fish, Bruno said, simply because there were no fish bones at dig sites. The reason fish bones were not found at dig sites was simply that fish bones do not last; they are rare to archeological sites.
This is faulty reasoning, but we needed them not to have fished, Bruno said, because fishing requires skill and cunning and people had already decided Thals lacked both. Until an inconvenient fact emerged: fish grease was found on cutting tools at a dig site in the Rhône valley, Bruno said, and the tools were too old to belong to sapiens. With more sophisticated sieving, archeologists could now better detect fish residue. The possibility that Neanderthals ate fish was becoming harder to suppress. But some still trotted out questions about method, such as, If we aren’t finding lures and hooks and harpoons, how do we know these Neanderthals were catching fish? Might they have stumbled upon a salmon run so dense that fish sprang up onto a riverbank and were eaten?
This is an actual postulation in a paper I’ve read, Bruno said. Trained thinkers, asking if fish all but flopped into the mouths of Neanderthals, because such a miracle is more comfortable for academics to conjure than the idea that Thal had skills, and that he fished.
Here is where my own work, if I may call it work, Bruno said, becomes instructive. Just as anthropologists were mystified by the behavior of smoke in a cave, while I was never mystified by the behavior of smoke in a cave, since I live in a cave, and keep an active hearth, those who believe that Neanderthals could not have caught fish without specialized tools have never learned to fish without such tools. If you have not learned to handfish, it is difficult to grasp a scenario in which human hands become lure and hook and also net.
Bruno had started to fish with his bare hands long before he had taken up contemplation of early people, long before he’d retreated to life in a cave.
During the war, when he had lived with the old woman in the country, he’d watched a small furry animal, a pine marten, patiently holding its snout in the water of a stream, in between two rocks. It did not seem to be drinking. A young perch moved downstream and settled in between the rocks near the animal’s snout. The pine marten held still. The perch was also still, sidled up against the face of the pine marten, as water purled around this odd pair. What is going on here, Bruno had wondered, and then this brown furry pine martin lifted its head in a kind of slow motion, and bit down, also in a kind of slow motion. The fish flapped; the animal held on.
After observing this strange occurrence once more, Bruno surmised that the animal was using touch, perhaps its whiskers, or its nose, to tickle the fish. The fish, he guessed, was responding to this sensation by going still, as if paralyzed, rendering itself catchable, killable, eatable.
Bruno tried putting his hand in the creek, in between two rocks, just as he’d seen the pine marten do with its snout. He waited. This was in spring, and the water was frigid. His hand ached, but he vowed to use patience the way this little creature had. Two long afternoons, nothing happened except he lost feeling in his hand. But he kept at it. Eventually a fish rested at the juncture between submerged rocks. He felt its side, the texture of its scales, making contact with the tips of his fingers. His heart began to pound, and the pounding of his heart warmed his blood and gave him the resolve to stay still. The fish very slowly adjusted itself so that its side was brushing against Bruno’s hand. All at once he closed his hand and dug his fingernails into its gills.
He lost that fish.
What he came to understand, as he tried again and again to fish by hand, was that the final movement, the kill, could not be sudden. There must be no swift movements. He learned to close his hand slowly but forcefully, to extinguish the life of the fish.
Bruno spent the last year of the war neck-deep in the waterways of the southern Corrèze, his face tilted up to breathe, the waterline at his chin and his ears, his hands low, down in the depths. He would remain in this demanding position for hours, waiting for a bream or a perch or a brown trout, the holiest of catches.
Now that I am old, Bruno said, I no longer fish. My age and my resolve have reduced and simplified my dietary needs. I have taken already my fill from the rivers and lakes and streams. What stays with me, and perhaps informs my thinking still, is the transmission of knowledge that I learned by touch.
By touch I could tell you what kind of fish had brushed up against my hand.
By that same touch I could tell you what part of the fish’s body was against my hand.
And I could tell you how large this fish was, that I was touching.
Because I learned the art of handfishing, Bruno said, I can imagine a number of ways the Thals might have caught their own fish. A number of ways by which their “technology” was artful and ingenious, but humble.
I don’t have proof. I don’t need proof.
What do scientists do? They look for proof. In its absence, they set up models. An experiment, such as the one they designed to figure out how Thals might have hunted choughs.
I do not set up models. What I do is live. And because of the way I have lived, I know what is possible.
HOT WEATHER STRETCHED over a series of days and sent the Moulinards off to swim in the river each afternoon, in a large group that included people I otherwise didn’t interact with, the dour girls with babies, and the men who operated tractors and worked the fields.
I joined on one of these swim outings, hoping to form connections with others in the group. I was planning to target particular individuals Nadia had spoken of, such as Aurélie, one of the main people apparently opposed to me. Aurélie ran the group’s stall at the local open-air markets, selling what they grew and canned. She wore overalls and work boots and shoved her hands in her front pockets in a style that was emphatically tough, but her hair, brown and shiny and falling to her waist, softened her tomboy pose.
People walked down the road toward the river in little groups. Few of them brought a towel. The men wore cutoffs. The women were in faded old bathing suits of snagged nylon and loose elastic.
Their swimming hole was the same location where Pascal and I had watched the boy who jumped from the top of the tree, the one who had impregnated his teacher.
