Auruthmer’s expression softened slightly. He hoped that meant she appreciated they weren’t primitives to be lied to—rather than being happy the animals had learned a new trick. She glanced up at the sky and the leaden shadow that was the living ship.

“Come inside,” she said. “We’ll sit in the warmth, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you from the very beginning.”

Interlude: The Humans

Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

So here we are.

I’ve taken you through all the other spurs that arose from the tree of time and went their own way. Now it’s time for me to unveil any final revelations or reversals of fortune. Time to uncover any last surprises this multiplied cosmos might have for you. And once you understand this last twist, you can understand our current dilemma.

In our timeline, this late branch on the tree, there are no hyperintelligent cats. And if the rodents grow as large as capybaras, they only grow as smart as capybaras, which is exactly how smart capybaras need to be. Big brains are expensive, and species must cut their evolutionary cloth to suit their purse. Being clever isn’t the universal panacea we’d maybe like it to be.

No dinosaurs, then; no super-intelligent arthropods or molluscs. Just us.

Two and a half million years ago is as good a point to start as any. Our ancestors were apes that had left the forests for the plains. In the tall grass they stood taller, because the plains were full of things that wanted to eat them, and things they wanted to eat. Shorn of a role in locomotion, time found uses for their idle hands. This is where the stone tools start. And for a long, long time our ancestors don’t really do much in the way of R&D. They have fire, they have stone axes. They have a détente with the more dangerous predators. Sometimes the leopard gets you, sometimes you get the leopard, and if it’s the latter then you have a new blanket and a story to tell. Because they told stories, we’re sure, even then. Although perhaps they were just the same stories at first, over and over, the same proto-words and gestures stuck together in the same ways.

Their brains work at a level that contemporaneous apes—and modern apes—can’t imitate. They learn more quickly from one another, copying the movements that turn this rock into that blade. They remember. And they confabulate beyond the dreams of chimps. Or other primates. And yet for a million years our ancestors were happy with what they had.