The Kalambo Findings

 

The Kalambo Structure, found at the Kalambo Falls at the border between Tanzania and Zambia, was of the oldest hints of sedentary humans we had ever discovered. It was a simple cross made from wood, and it was dated to around 470,000 years ago. A while after the finding of this cross, a growing number of mostly younger fossils had started being discovered around the area of the Kalambo Falls, as a result of the growing interest in the region. Finger bones and some smaller broken bone fragments, as well as a handfull of sharpened stones and other tools hinted at activity of archaic humans in the region. Soon, as always in this field, theories regarding the nature and habits of these humans had been not just accepted, but dogmatized. But even if the paleoanthropologists involved were certain as ever regarding their interpretations, their arrogance would soon turn against them and hunt them down. In fact, neither the bone morphology, let alone genetic composition, nor the use cases of the discovered tools had yet been understood at all, due to the bad condition of the artifacts. The Kalambo structure itself was even one of the most obvious ones, probably hinting at some kind of deliberate production process. While some of those human samples were being analyzed in labs back in Europe, many researchers, including myself, had gotten interested in the dense woodlands surrounding the river. What brought my attention to this wider area was that a couple of weeks after arriving at the site, I had received a hint from one of the locals about a mostly uncontacted tribe which inhabits an area relatively close by. This little fairy tale made my mind produce fantasies of those people potentially having transmitted ancient knowledge, via cultural memes such as traditions, or maybe even concrete stone paintings which they kept in their possession as historic artifacts. Maybe it was irrational overexcitement, but my colleagues and I hypothesized the tribespeople to be direct successors of the humans whose remains we were digging up at the Kalambo site. Their mysterious past made them an extremely interesting population for us, and the incomplete nature of much of the information present desperately required further investigation. The tribespeople had originally spoken their own language, but had recently adopted parts of the local language. They were however believed to not have genetically mixed much with other humans, as there were just no other uncivilized humans around the area. Some people even brought up the theory that at some point in their past a violent population bottleneck had occurred in which most of their people had died, and they struggled to survive since. It was assumed that they had to learn much of their construction methods and tool usage from scratch after the event, because most of their knowledge was lost in this cataclysmic event. This idea was mostly supported by the fact that the younger structures found by the paleontologists were actually less complex than those dated further back in time. Incredible!

Shortly after getting all this information, I made a successful effort to bribe a local farmer to guide me and my colleague Howard to these people in order to convince them to accept me as a visitor in their midst. Our encounter was rather difficult at first, but with a lot of fruit and meat and some machetes as a gift for the tribespeople we managed to gain their trust. They looked crude - no superfluous body decorations, very simple clothing, grim faces, and no clear leader was visible. I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for them. Even the simple goods we provided to them were fought over immediately after being received. Maybe it was a good thing they could not possibly comprehend the full extent of comfort and power which modern society could bring to them. I saw in them a struggling, weak group of lost souls. They were all rather short, but in particular their lower bodies looked strikingly robust. This was actually good news, because it matched what other scientists had been able to reconstruct about the younger skeleton parts they had found. It was immediately very clear for Howard and me that these people were indeed quite pure descendants of the archaic humans we were interested in. This way, I was able to start my journey into a different world with high hopes. Howard and I had agreed for a messenger to come to us exactly in the middle of my stay to exchange letters. The idea was that in light of the rapid developments of the Kalambo findings right now we would not be able to wait until the end of my stay to publish my findings. Also, it was not at all guaranteed that I would survive my stay there, and if I were to die here, all my notes would be lost. So we saw an intermediate information exchange as necessary, and this upcoming exchange would subsequently provide an important mental anchor for me during my stay.  

From my first day in the community, I started writing down everything I learned with great interest. Their level of tool usage was generally quite low compared to comparable groups known to us. The sleeping places were rather simple as well, partly just holes dug into slopes, and partly simple assemblies of branches and bones from large animals. I learned how they formed relationships (in contrast to most modern humans, their relationships were highly polygamous), how they collected fruit and nuts, how they organized hunting, and who took on which role in the community. It turned out that everyone did almost everything, the collectors collected for one day, then they hunt for a day, after which they rest a couple of days and just process what is already inside the village. I was very excited to get to know these great people better, in particular to question them about their ancestors. I got interested in their hunting strategies and wanted to join them, but was told no, and I was not even allowed to leave the camp as long as I was under their protection. They seemed rather nervous talking about hunting. I did not protest. I did not know much about the wildlife in my exact location, but I assumed there were some big animals in some areas around here which can be dangerous to someone who doesn’t know how to behave around them. In fact, even if their level of technology was practically non-existent, these men seemed physically quite capable indeed, and their unmoving straight stares expressed a fascinating amount of confidence. So if they said hunting is dangerous, I would believe them. So I stayed home another day, and the following days as well. Instead of joining the hunters out in the forest I learned about more domestic matters, and every evening these hunters returned with a large number of what looked like rodents and rabbits. Some of the other animals I did not know by name, and some of the names of animals mentioned I was not able to recognize either. One of these animals they called Badudus. I had never seen one, but there was talk about a bigger Badudu hunt taking place soon. Apparently it was a night hunt, as these animals belong to the kind that is easier to catch at night, and night hunts were rather rare in this tribe. Badudus were also said to be a larger animal, and hunting larger animals required more care and different weaponry than setting up rabbit traps and the likes. The possibility of large wild animals roaming around close to the settlement justified to me why I was not allowed on the hunts, and I was actually quite happy now to be in the hands of these quite capable looking warriors. The longer I stayed here, the more I trusted in their physical skills. It felt like it made sense now that they could survive for so long, even though their population was so small, and modern humanity threatened to overrun them. After all, these people are perfectly adapted to their environment, and in addition, the success of homo sapiens implied also the high genetic quality of these members of the species in particular. I learned a lot in my first days, but to my disappointment I soon had to accept that these people would not be able to give me any answers to my questions regarding their ancient ancestors. Any time I tried mentioning it, they blocked it off immediately by stating that they just did not know. It seemed like they carried no memories from before the cataclysmic event. What complicated the matter even more was that in fact communicating with them was generally quite difficult. It seemed like their dialect was quite far from the way I had learned the language, and the overlap in words we were able to use was so small that we had to communicate in rather simple words. I had already made some progress in understanding them better, but it was going to take me some more weeks in the community to adapt properly to their way of communicating. Nonetheless, their apparent ignorance contrasted my expectations, and was quite disappointing to hear. Their ignorance went even further, in fact: They could not even tell me anything specific about the lives of their parents. For some reason, they seemed not to be able to talk about their past at all. 

A couple of weeks in I stumbled into a ceremony which they had kept secret from me until then. After the hunters had returned that day, what must have been the tribe’s sharman (though he was not dressed in a particularly different fashion) came and took one of the rabbit carcasses into his burrow. All of the hunters followed. He took apart the carcass with a knife, in particular isolating the bones. He then continued to arrange them into a humanoid shape, which, I inferred, was meant to resemble themselves. He threw some tinder on the homunculus and set the whole thing on fire. I recognized that the essential purpose of the ritual was probably to cast a sort of protection spell on their village and its hunters by sacrificing this animal. They were all talking at the same time, saying incomprehensible words in their own strong dialect. It resembled a grunting out of strong emotions more than a discussion. My questions regarding the nature of the ritual were met with incoherent ramblings about, as far as I was able to guess based on what little I was able to understand, the idea of karmic traces. It was confusing. But then I remembered what I was here for, and excitement overcame me: Was this ritual the seed of ancient knowledge I had been searching for? Surely they had not been able to pass on direct memories of the cataclysm that had wrecked their great ancestors. But culture, however, can be more persistent. Even without writing and proper language, those people have transmitted the knowledge that something existed in their past which is wildly dangerous, and that safety cannot be taken for granted. I considered the bottleneck theory once again: What if their ancestors from right after the hypothesized near-extinction of their tribe have initiated this ritual because they thought that the cataclysm was some divine punishment for killing and eating animals? It would be a strange way of asking for forgiveness, though - killing yet another animal and not even eating it. Or maybe they knew the real cause for their dwindling population? Maybe what had happened, had happened quite fast, and it was clear how to protect yourself from it. So they had decided to construct a memetic agent, with a hidden message to their successors, telling them the dangers of certain behaviours and how to avoid another catastrophe. But as far as I could tell, if that was what the ritual was for, it appears that only part of its meaning was preserved. Then, however, I could not explain how whatever was lurking for them in those woods has not yet been able to kill off the community. What was the danger they tried to warn their descendants from, though, that was able to wipe out a whole such population? Maybe it was animals of a different species after all which took away their food, or even aggressively raided the villages of those people. Was it the Badudus? I still had not seen any such animals, and the hunters seem to only bring home small animals. I found it plausible to believe that they had already wiped out any populations of larger animals around here, but now this old warning, in the form of a ritual, persists in their tiny community, even if they do not understand its meaning. 

The next day, after they had returned with more rabbit carcasses, I kept my eye on the hunters for longer than usual. The prey was a lot. People immediately ate a big part of it, and kept another part for later consumption. The rest, the hunters carried outside the village. They surely had a weird relationship with animals, and it surely did not include the idea of eat-what-you-kill. 

To add to my confusion, later the same day a dead rat appeared at the village periphery, and it was met with exaggerated, distorted mimics by the tribe's people. I looked away in shock as soon as they started beating the animal with sticks. I saw that one of the passive hunters had spotted me, and was about to ask him what was going on, when I realized the potential danger I was in. I felt shaky. I looked at his legs - instead of sitting he had changed his stance to a half-squat, and he looked stable and ready. I looked back up, and his gaze overwhelmed me. I was convinced that I saw something from another world in his eyes. Knowledge that I could not access, and emotions I could never feel. What was he thinking? I shuddered, and felt frozen. 

I hardly dared to ask any more questions after that day - partly because the answers I had gotten so far were usually useless anyways. Another reason however was that the recent turn of events had started to make me feel slightly uneasy asking critical questions from my rather powerless position as an outsider in the tribe. 

I had first thought I was not immersed enough in the intricacies of their culture to properly understand it. But my mental model had now started to develop in another direction, which portrayed these tribespeople as way more simplistic than what we had previously thought.

The following days, my courage to voice open questions was significantly suppressed by the growing distance I felt from the tribespeople. Instead, I concentrated harder to question my own mind. I felt that to get anywhere here, I needed to break down hidden assumptions which had too little evidence supporting them. 

These people really did not like to talk. Even though they did speak some form of the local language, and I was not able to easily judge how well they spoke it due to my own limited abilities, I noticed that they spoke very little during the day, and I realized that what they said to each other mostly was short instructions or vocalizations of emotions. What’s more is that my initial optimism regarding my acquisition of their dialect was more and more pushed back by the sheer confusion I was confronted with every time they talked. They further seemed to have very little empathy or other stabilizing social constructs. The tribespeople, probably having noticed something was off, consequently would share less and less with me. I felt like I was not welcome anymore. From that point on, my life in the tribe would progressively more lonely. 

That evening I was sitting outside of my sleeping hut after the ritual, when it had already turned dark outside and an intense night sky was showing itself above me, and I was drowning in thought in light of my failing mission. 

How naive it had been of me to think I could find out anything about humans from such a deep past. They could not even remember what had happened in their parents’ generation! We all are just ants, quickly smashed by the immense hand of time. 500.000 years is a devastating force of nature. It will rip apart a whole city of stone, if that is what the tribe had built here back then. It is a miracle it left any memory on earth at all. If only I could ask the milky way hanging above me what she had seen go down here, at the Kalambo Falls, all these years ago. 

I had just reached the middle point of my planned stay in the settlement, which marked the time of the planned letter exchange. I knew that a letter had been placed by Howard’s messenger a couple minutes walk from here two days ago, and today was my chance to pick it up. In order not to risk any unwanted reactions by the tribe, the exchange was done in secret, and impersonal. I had sneaked out of the settlement tonight because I knew that it would be rather empty this night. They had been more and more talk around the upcoming Badudu hunt recently, and even they did not directly inform me about their plans anymore, I realized that when this evening the whole tribe except 2 men and one woman left for the woods, it would probably be the day. I remembered them saying that the Badudu hunt would happen at night because they could make the animals pray freeze with the lights of their fire torches and they would thus be a comparably easy to kill by throwing spears at them. They were quite skilled with their spears, as I had seen countless times in their practice sessions. That night, after seeing almost the whole tribe leave with weapons and torches, I sneaked out, being quite careful not to wake up the man sleeping next to me. I waited until the hunters had disappeared in the distance, and the whole time they were miraculously completely quiet, masterfully avoiding breaking any branches with their steps, which would give away their position to prey animals. The agreed upon location of the letter exchange was a hollow tree, ca. 15 minutes walking distance North, towards the village where the other scientists were staying, while for the messenger it should have taken about an hour to walk there. When I arrived, I picked up Howard’s letter and placed my own writings there. Even further North I could see some torches from the distance. The hunters were not too far, but too far to hear my clumsy steps. Nonetheless, I walked with slow, quiet steps, doing my best to prevent causing any loud noises. I was thankful that we were so careful with this exchange, even if we had not been able to expect the many little inconsistencies that would soon sum up and come to haunt me. I took the letter in one hand and a candle in the other and started walking back to the settlement while skimming the sentences my colleague had written to me. Their content however had a heavier impact on me than I had expected, and I focused less and less on walking and more and more on reading as I went on. Each of my steps became shorter than the last one, and my ears tuned out all the sounds of night birds and frogs and my eyes were seeing nothing but this letter, as the words were slowly consuming me. Within seconds a thick goo of confusion had surrounded me, slowing me down and robbing me of mental autonomy. I felt its viscosity around my limbs, I felt it enter my nose and ears, my eyes and finally the windings of my cortex before it hardened, making me feel fragile and old. I stopped walking to be able to re-read the whole thing properly, and then I understood. Fear now shook me violently and consumed me, and after an exhausting episode of near-hallucinatory thought-cycles, finally spat me out in a trajectory radially away from the very settlement I was about to return to. With no consideration of hiding myself I was now sprinting towards the scientist’s village. As I was running I could feel the souls of my long extinguished brothers wash past my cold, wet skin, trying to hold on to me as they were whispering confusing spells into my ear, begging me for mercy, for something which I had not done, and I could not have prevented. 


Dear Arthur, 

I hope this letter finds you, and I hope you are well. I have to apologize for initially criticising you so much for going on this adventure. While I still think it is incredibly risky, I now agree with you that it is worth it. The scientists that are in Kalambo right now are getting ever more excited - I don’t quite agree with them, as I will describe below, but either way I think we are discovering something of great interest for our field here. Exciting times! I cannot wait to read what you have written about your last couple of weeks. Here are some updates from our side, just so that you know what is going on: 

Your official reports might indeed become essential for our progress, in particular because the Paleontologists are starting to get a little bit confused by their findings associated with the Kalambo Structure. Recent laboratory test results have now confirmed that the bones found next to all these structures we have found are almost definitely Homo Sapiens bones. But the younger bone fragments, from a couple thousand years ago but badly preserved, are now hypothesized by some younger scientists to not be Sapiens after all, but Homo Neanderthalensis. It seems that those guys have already forgotten that we already know that Neanderthals have never lived in this area, and that the species is of course already extinct since 40.000 years. Maybe these kids lack the experience, or they are too easily excited. And of course they did not see the tribespeople with their own eyes and they do not understand how similar those hypothesized “Neanderthal” bodies are to those actually living humans in the tribe. They will not believe my account as my contact with them was very brief, but they agreed that a more elaborate and structured account, as expected from you, would eradicate the last doubt that the younger bones are Homo Sapiens after all I am already in the process of drafting a commentary which critically responds to their yet to be published paper. Once you are back, you can help me polish it and be the second author. I am looking forward to it! 

Another interesting thing that has happened around here, is that while driving about half an hour south from the Kalambo Falls I have found a burned down village. Talking about it to the locals at the falls, I found out that there are two more such deserted villages around here, but apparently they have been empty for some generations and no one knows what happened there. I went there, and there was no trace of any human remains. No corpses, not even bones. Not all the buildings have been burnt, and anyways it is not likely that everyone of the whole village would burn to death, right? So where did the people go then? I wonder if you think this is connected to the supposed near-extinction of the Kalambo tribe?  I am waiting patiently for you to return and give me your opinion on the matter. 

Best Regards, 

Howard