Hominids

“Well, I realize this is your field, Professor Vaughan—” Had she really in all the time they’d spent quarantined together never volunteered that Louise could call her Mary?—“but I’ve been reading up on this on the Web. As far as I can tell, those earlier kinds of man didn’t really have behavior any more sophisticated than a beaver building a dam.”

“They made tools,” said Mary.

“Oui,” said Louise. “But weren’t they repetitive, virtually identical tools, turned out over the centuries by the thousands? All made to the same mental template, the same design?”

Mary nodded. “That’s true.”

“Surely there has to be some natural variation among stone tools,” said Louise, “just based on chance accidents and random differences that occur when implements are chipped from stone. If there was consciousness at work, even without coming up with a better idea on their own, early humans should have seen that some tools happened to be better than others. It’s like you don’t have to think of the round wheel right off the bat; you might start with a five-sided one, then accidentally make a six-sided one—and note that it rolled slightly better. Eventually, you’d come up with the perfectly round one.”

Mary nodded.

“But if there’s no consciousness at work,” said Louise, “you simply toss aside the better version as not fitting your mental template of what was supposed to be produced. Right? And that’s what happens with the tools in the archeological record: instead of gradual refinement over time, they just stay the same. And the only explanation I can think of for that is that there was no conscious selection of better variants: the toolmaker simply wasn’t aware, he couldn’t see that this particular way of hitting nodules produced something better than that way. The design was frozen.”

“Interesting take,” said Mary, genuinely impressed.

“And when we see complex repetitive behavior in other animals—such as building a dam—we call it instinct, and that’s what that kind of toolmaking was. No, until Homo sapiens, there was no consciousness, and—here’s the kicker—in fact, for the first sixty thousand years that Homo sapiens existed, there was no consciousness.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mary.

“When did anatomically modern humans first appear?” asked Louise, picking up her coffee cup again.

“About one hundred thousand years ago.”

“That’s the same figure I saw on the web. Now, do I understand that right? A hundred-K years in the past, creatures that looked exactly like us, that walked exactly like us, first appeared, right? Creatures with brains that were the same size and shape as our brains, judging by their cranial cavities?”

“That’s right,” said Mary. She’d finished her chips, and got some Kleenex out of her purse so she could wipe her greasy fingers.

“But,” said Louise, “according to what I read, for sixty thousand years, they thought no thoughts. For sixty thousand years, they did nothing that wasn’t instinctual. But then, forty thousand years ago, everything changed.”

Mary’s eyes went wide. “The Great Leap Forward.”

“Exactly!”

Mary felt her heart pounding. The Great Leap Forward was the term some anthropologists gave to the cultural awakening that occurred 40,000 years ago; others called it the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. As Louise had said, modern-looking human beings had been around for six hundred centuries by that point, but they created no art, they didn’t adorn their bodies with jewelry, and they didn’t bury their dead with grave goods. But starting simultaneously 40,000 years ago, suddenly humans were painting beautiful pictures on cave walls, humans were wearing necklaces and bracelets, and humans were interring their loved ones with food and tools and other valuable objects that could only have been of use in a presumed afterlife. Art, fashion, and religion all appeared simultaneously; truly, a great leap forward.

“So you’re saying that some Cro-Magnon 40,000 years ago suddenly started making choices, and the universe started splitting?”

“Not exactly,” said Louise. She’d evidently finished her first coffee; she got up and bought a second one. “Think about this: what caused the Great Leap Forward?”

“Nobody knows,” said Mary.

“For all intents and purposes, it’s a marker, right there in the archeological record, showing the dawn of consciousness, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose,” said Mary.

“But that dawning isn’t accompanied by any gross physical change; it’s not like a new form of humanity appeared who suddenly started making art. Brains capable of consciousness had existed for sixty thousand years, but they weren’t conscious. And then something happened.”

“The Great Leap Forward, yes. But, as I said, no one knows what caused it.”

“You ever read Roger Penrose? The Emperor’s New Mind?”

Mary shook her head.

“Penrose is an Oxford mathematician. He contends that human consciousness is quantum-mechanical in nature.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that what we think of as intelligence, as sentience, doesn’t arise from some biochemical network of neurons, or anything as crude as that. Rather, it arises from quantum processes. Specifically, he and an anesthesiologist named Hameroff argue that quantum superposition of isolated electrons in the microtubules of brain cells creates the phenomenon of consciousness.”

“Ah,” said Mary dubiously.

Louise sipped some of her new coffee. “Well, don’t you see?” she said. “That explains the Great Leap Forward. Sure, our brains had been just as they are today since one hundred thousand years ago, but consciousness didn’t begin until a quantum-mechanical event occurred, presumably at random: the one and only spi

Mary nodded; it was an interesting notion.

“And quantum events, by their very nature, have multiple possible outcomes,” said Louise. “Instead of that quantum fluctuation, or whatever it was, creating consciousness in Homo sapiens, the same thing might have happened in the other kind of humanity that existed 40,000 years ago—Neanderthal man! The first splitting of the universe was an accident, a quantum fluke. In one branch, thought and cognition arose in our ancestors; in another, it arose in Ponter’s ancestors. I read that Neanderthals had been around since maybe 200,000 years ago, right?”

Mary nodded.

“And they had even bigger brains than we did, right?”

Mary nodded again.

“But on this world,” said Louise, “in this timeline, those brains never sparked with consciousness. Ours did instead, and the edge that consciousness gave us—cu

“Ah!” said Mary. “But in Ponter’s world—”

Louise nodded. “In Ponter’s world, the opposite happened. It was Neanderthals who became conscious, developing art and culture—and cu

“I suppose that’s possible,” said Mary. “You could probably get a good paper out of that.”

“More than that,” said Louise. She sipped some more coffee. “If I’m right, it means Ponter might get to go home.”

Mary’s heart fluttered. “What?”

“I’m basing this in part on stuff Ponter told me, and in part on our own world’s understanding of physics. Suppose that each time the universe splits, it doesn’t do it the way amoebas do—with one amoeba becoming two daughters, and the parent disappearing in the process. Suppose instead it happens more like vertebrates giving birth: the original universe continues on, and a new daughter universe is created.”

“Yes?” said Mary. “So?”