The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross Page A

guesswork. It looks crude, the brow ridges heavy and the jaw powerful enough to crack walnuts. “Meet your great-to-the-nth-grandfather, Jim. Jim is a well-preserved specimen of
Homo erectus
, a species of hominin – our closest living relatives – that lived from roughly two million years ago until they became extinct around 70,000 BC, at around the same time as the Toba supervolcano erupted. There’s some argument about how closely Jim’s people are related to us; some of the earlier specimens have been categorized as
Homo ergaster
or
Homo habilis
, and it’s not clear whether he’s a direct ancestor of
Neanderthal man
and
Homo sapiens
or an extinct offshoot.
    “However, I want you to be
very
clear that Jim is neither an Australopithecine nor an Ape. He’s an early modern specimen of genus
Homo
, the family of species of which our kind is the only survivor to this date.”
    Kylie pauses, raises a bottle of water for a sip, and remarks drily: “In this business we get to deal with a lot of ‘begats.’ It can feel a bit Biblical at times – especially the holy wars over cladistics.”
    They’re still chuckling when she lowers her bottle and hits the trackpad again. Another slide, another skull: going by the ruler next to it, this one shrank in the wash. She leaves it on the screen just long enough for the audience to spot it, then brings up another slide: now the infant-sized skull is joined by a full-sized adult one. “These are both grown-ups. The one on the right is a Neanderthal specimen, and the one on the left is LB1, a well-preserved adult specimen of
Homo floresiensis
, Flores Man. You may have heard them described as hobbits: one thing I’d like to put straight right away is that Professor Tolkien was making things up – the name was applied to them after the fact, and it’s a bit embarrassing to those of us in the field because of the misconceptions it comes with. Names come with baggage. Some of my colleagues thought at first they were dealing with island dwarfism – Flores is an island, and species on islands frequently suffer from deficiency diseases. There’s also evolutionary selection pressure for small size. (Think of Shetland ponies, for example.) But we’ve recently confirmed that LB1 is a distinct subspecies of
Homo
, one that lived from about 90,000 years ago right up until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago. Fully grown, she’d have been about one meter ten tall – that’s three foot six in old money – and there’s evidence that the hobbits of Flores used fire and Upper Paleolithic hand tools. Small skulls and small brains don’t automatically imply lack of intelligence: we’ve used X-ray tomography to measure her brain volume, and it turns out that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with higher cognition, is about the same size as that of a modern human.
    “That’s another key point I want you to hang on to: intelligence isn’t purely a function of brain size. Albert Einstein’s brain wasn’t notably huge, and LB1 wasn’t obviously backward compared to her full-sized contemporaries on the continent.
    “Now, let’s move swiftly on. Our friend
Homo neanderthalensis
appeared about 300,000 years ago and disappeared about 40,000 years ago. He’s your prototype ape man, courtesy of Hollywood, but frankly if you put one in a business suit and met him or her in a meeting like this you probably wouldn’t realize. Neanderthals were heavily built with thick bones and heavier brow ridges than most of us have today – but there’s some debate as to whether they’re even a different species, or just people like us,
abapted
– that is, selected, rather than adapted – by living in a period of intense glaciation. We recently acquired a complete genome sequence for this guy, and they definitely interbred with our ancestors about forty to sixty thousand years ago. They also buried their dead with grave goods, cooked their food, and we think