Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [52]
“Frisbee is Robin’s religion.”
“Well of course,” Robin said.
“Oh come on,” Spencer scolded, untying his fiery dreads from their topknot. “It’s bigger than that.”
Frank laughed with the others.
“It is,” Spencer insisted. “Bigger and older.”
“Older than religion?”
“Older than humanity. Older than Homo sapiens.”
Frank stared at Spencer, surprised by this chiming with his evolutionary musings. “How do you mean?”
Spencer grabbed his gold disk by its edge. “There’s a prehistoric tool called the Acheulian hand axe. They were made for hundreds of thousands of years without any changes in design. Half a million years! That makes it a lot older than Homo sapiens. It was a Homo erectus tool. And the thing is, the archeologists named them hand axes without really knowing what they were. They don’t actually look like they would make good hand axes.”
“How so?” Frank said.
“They’re sharpened all the way around, so where are you going to hold the thing? There isn’t a good place to hold it if you hit things with it. So it couldn’t have been a hand axe. And yet there are millions of them in Africa and Europe. There are dry lakebeds in Africa where the shorelines are coated with these things.”
“Bifaces,” Frank said, looking at his golf disk and remembering illustrations in articles he had read. “But they weren’t round.”
“No, but almost. And they’re flat, that’s the main thing. If you were to throw one it would fly like a frisbee.”
“You couldn’t kill anything very big.”
“You could kill small things. And this guy Calvin says you could spook bigger animals.”
“Hobbes doesn’t agree,” Robert put in.
“No really!” Spencer cried, grinning. “This is a real theory, this is what archeologists are saying now about these bifaces. They even call it the killer frisbee theory.”
The others laughed.
“But it’s true,” Spencer insisted, whipping his dreads side-to-side. “It’s obviously true. You can feel it when you throw.”
“You can, Rasta man.”
“Everyone can!” He appealed to Frank: “Am I right?”
“You are right,” Frank said, still laughing at the idea. “I sort of remember that killer frisbee theory. I’m not sure it ever got very far.”
“So? Scientists are not good at accepting new theories.”
“Well, they like evidence before they do that.”
“Sometimes things are just too obvious! You can’t be throwing out a theory just because people think frisbees are some kind of hippie thing.”
“Which they are,” Robert pointed out.
Frank said, “No. You’re right.” Still, he had to laugh; listening to Spencer was like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror, hearing one of his theories being parodied by an expert mimic. The wild glee in Spencer’s blue eyes suggested there was some truth to this interpretation. He would have to be more careful in what he said.
But the facts of the situation remained, and could not be ignored. His unconscious mind, his deep mind, was at that very moment humming happily through all its parcellations. It was a total response. Deep inside lay an ancient ability to throw things at things, waiting patiently for its moment of redeployment.
“That was good,” he said as he got up to leave.
“Google Acheulian hand axes,” Spencer said. “You’ll see.”
The next day Frank did that, and found it was pretty much as Spencer had said. Certain anthropologists had proposed that the rapid evolutionary growth of the human brain was caused by the mentation necessary for throwing things at a target; and a subset of these considered the bifaced hand axes to be their projectiles of choice, “killer frisbees,” as one William Calvin indeed called them. Used to stampede animals at waterholes, he claimed, after which the hominids pounced on animals knocked over by the rush. The increase in predictive power needed to throw the flattened rocks accurately had led to the brain’s frontal lobe growth.
Frank still had to laugh, despite his will to believe. As one of the editors of the Journal of Sociobiology he had seen a lot of crazy theories explaining hominid evolution, and he recognized immediately that this was another specimen to add