Hominin

HOMININ

— by —

Craig Stanford

Copyright 2013 Craig Stanford

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed for any commercial or non-commercial use without permission from the author.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

ISBN 9780615907031

Contents

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

About the Author

"All man’s troubles arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be."

—From You Shall Know Them, by Vercors (1953)

Preface

The main events in this story haven’t happened yet, but they soon could. Advances in genetics in the early twenty-first century have enabled us to reconstitute extinct species from bits of DNA gleaned from well-preserved body parts. Enhanced by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), embryos can be implanted in the uterus of a female of a related species. There is a resurrected banteng - the ancestor of domestic cattle – already in a zoo, and someday woolly mammoths and dodos will surely join them. Such cloning allows us to tinker with Nature in ways never dreamed of, although the endeavor is fraught with ethical dilemmas. Such technology makes it inevitable that sometime soon we will learn that a research team has been creating hybrids of other closely related species, including humans and the great apes. The only honest answer that an evolutionary biologist can give to the question can it be done? is yes, but we hope that no one will try to do it. For the past two decades, the only obstacle to combining human and ape genetic material to create a hybrid has been the ethical one, the biomedical barriers having been breached long ago. Such a hybrid may, in fact, have been created already, but the resulting embryo or fetus was probably destroyed by the researchers for fear that their careers would be devastated when the public realized they had dabbled in such a moral quagmire. The reason that no human-ape hybrids have come to light yet is simple: the creator of such a chimera would be subject to public scorn and possibly criminal charges. But of course, these risks did not stop Galileo from telling the public about a sun-centered solar system (he risked being burned at the stake), nor did they stop Darwin from going public with the theory of evolution in the face of the Church of England. To the extent that our moral sensibilities channel the course of science, science always seems to find the light of day.

There is no question that, ethics aside, such a hybrid would be extraordinarily useful in biomedical research, not to mention a rosetta stone of human origins. We would learn more about the ancestry of humanity than we could from all the fossils in all the museums of the world. Every aspect of the behavior and anatomy of earliest humans - the australopithecines - or of Homo erectus, is open to debate and argument because reconstructing an animal’s life from its bones is such an inexact science. An ape-human hybrid would be a walking textbook of everything that made us human, and everything that reminds us that we are little more than big-brained apes.

I write these words while sitting at a tiny wooden desk, in the shadowy light of a kerosene lantern, in a corrugated tin hut on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. I first came to Tanzania years ago to study wild chimpanzees in collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall. Many of the scenes and depictions of the creatures in Hominin were inspired by my observations of wild chimpanzees. I am an evolutionary anthropologist, and have spent a large part of my adult life in tropical forests studying apes and monkeys, especially wild chimpanzees. I do this to shed some light on our earliest ancestors, the ones whose common descendants are our ape cousins. That ancestor lived in the almost-invisible past, some six million years ago, so the job involves a lot of educated guesswork. The sudden appearance of a human-chimpanzee hybrid would, in a perverse way, be the most fascinating and profoundly informative event in the history of science. We share nearly all of our DNA sequence with chimpanzees. Despite appearances, these apes are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. They can catch nearly all known transmissible human diseases. Their intellect, in every way that intellect can be measured, is at least comparable to that of a small child. Their hairy appearance aside, they are partly human, and we are partly ape, and only a form of racism – perhaps better called species-ism - allows to treat them in ways that we would never treat a human child. We experiment on chimpanzees, inject them with awful diseases, imprison them in zoos, allow them to be exploited by Hollywood and the biomedical industry. How genetically like us does a creature need to be until we are willing to grant it human rights? Would we have to consider an ape-human hybrid to be legally and morally a human, but of diminished mental capacity? Or a very smart wild animal? Would such a hybrid have language? Could it express it’s desires and ambitions in life? Could it be found guilty of murder? Could it be owned, or would that be slavery? And so on.

This book is about the birth and fate of the first generation of human-ape hybrids. It is fictionalized science, but definitely not fantasy. We can pretend to ourselves that no one would ever do such a thing as hybridize a human and an ape. But believe me, someone soon will.

Prologue

What she remembered later was the long rows of white ceiling tiles. They were punctuated by glaring fluorescent lights that she had stared at often the past three years while lying on her back, during countless procedures at an endless succession of doctor’s offices, clinics and hospitals. And now she sat in yet another doctor’s office, across an expanse of mahogany desk from a dapper, silver-haired physician in a lab coat who was droning his way through the message that they both knew it was his job to say. Just get it over with and let me cope in my own way, she thought. But she let him drone on about acceptable risks, minimized risks, and the always-present chances of failures such as the one that they were facing now. She half-listened, and stared at perfectly coiffed hair, the diplomas on the wall, and those ever-present ceiling tiles. You can have the fancy wooden desk and the cozy office, but they never let you forget it’s a hospital, she thought.

Miss Evers, I know this is sad and frustrating news for you; I understand all you’ve been through reproductively. Yeah, sure you do, she thought to herself. But you’re still young and you can, after a recovery period, try again.

She let her exasperation show. Doctor, I just don’t understand how, after all the shit I’ve gone through to make this pregnancy happen, it could just end like this. I was so close to... She broke down and cried. The doctor sat passively shuffling papers and waited for her whimpering to stop.

Jenny waited for him to break the silence. When he didn’t, she simply got up from the leather chair and walked slowly to the door. He met her at the door and opened it, handed her some paperwork, and put a hand lightly on her shoulder as he ushered her to the waiting room. She shuffled to a chair and collapsed into it, not ready to walk out into the glaring midday sun. She leaned back and rested her head against the wall, ignoring the other people reading their magazines, and thought back over the past three years.

She had never been pregnant, but then neither had most of her girlfriends. In her twenties, pregnancy was something to avoid like the plague, and had lived in fear of an accidental pregnancy for so long that she assumed it would happen quickly once she stopped trying to prevent it. So when she and Mark had decided they would have a child, she blamed him for her initial failure to conceive. After a year of trying, she sent him to a clinic for tests, which showed his sperm to be ample and mobile. Only then did she turn her attention to her own body. She emptied the bookstore of pregnancy books, everything from a vegan diet to the perfect sexual position. But a second year passed and she was still cycling like clockwork every month while making love to Mark regularly and with obsessive attention to her ovulation cycles, without an implanted zygote to show for it.

It was only after she saw an internet advertisement that she had made an appointment at the local infertility clinic. The Assisted Reproductive Technology center of Southern Humboldt County, or ARTHCO, was located in the region’s only large town, Fort Wolcott. ARTHCO served the sparsely populated region; its staff were highly recommended to perform IVF and IVF-related procedures. In-vitro fertilization, invented to allow women with blocked fallopian tubes to conceive, had grown into a multi-million dollar industry was used with any woman who had gone two years without conceiving. Its success rate had steadily increased, and a woman under forty - Jenny was thirty-six - had the same odds of having a baby using IVF as she would through natural pregnancy. Jenny was diagnosed with blocked fallopian tubes, and quickly decided to try IVF.

Although in theory IVF could be performed using one or more of Jenny’s eggs after she ovulated, simply mixed in the lab with a sample of her lover’s semen and then placed back into her uterus, women typically have eggs removed directed from their ovaries, which have undergone drug treatment to stimulate the ovaries to release multiple eggs. The odds of success were far greater than allowing Nature to take its course. Once the eggs were removed, they were prepared for fertilization by stripping them of their surrounding cell layers. Mark, meanwhile, had made his contribution to the process about two hours earlier. He emerged from a private hospital cubicle that was stocked with erotic videos carrying a styrofoam deli cup containing a puddle of semen, which was then subjected to a laboratory washing process that yielded only the most vigorous sperm cells. Jenny’s newly extracted egg was scheduled to meet Mark’s sperm in the petrie dish minutes later.

Jenny underwent weeks of expensive Metrodin hormonal therapy to stimulate the production of multiple eggs in her ovaries. At the same time she underwent additional hormone therapy to de-sensitize her pituitary gland. This would prevent the gland from secreting luteinizing hormone - needed to ready the egg for secretion - prematurely. All along blood tests and ultrasounds were done to monitor growth of the follicles. Once Jenny’s ovaries were deemed ready, the drug Profasi was administered, inducing production of the eggs themselves. That was the tense part. Under general anesthesia, a physician guided a surgically implanted camera-tipped laparoscope through her pelvis, examining her ovaries and fallopian tubes. Once he located an egg, it was carefully plucked from its follicle by a delicate suction tube and placed in a petrie dish.

Within an hour, one spermatocyte had found its way to the outer covering, the zona pellucida, of the egg. The multi-layered membrane had tiny receptor sites on its surface. These acted as locks, permitting one and only one entry. When the head of one of Mark’s sperm cells found a receptor site, it released an enzyme that dissolved the membrane, and the sperm was allowed to pass through to the egg. The membrane then barred the door to all late-comers. The following day, a rapidly dividing fertilized cell was surgically implanted on the wall of Jenny’s uterus, and she was pregnant.

Her pregnancy was uneventful except for some additional hormone therapy in the early stages. But in the middle of her second trimester, the cramping and bleeding began. The doctors ordered bed rest, and for the next month Jenny stayed home from her paralegal job, trying to remain as still as possible. She barely moved, and lived each hour in fear of losing the baby. Toward the end of her seventh month, she went to the hospital with abdominal pain, knowing something was terribly wrong. The ultrasound showed no movement, and the stethoscope found only her own maternal heartbeat. The doctor told her the fetus had likely had a congenital defect. It was just one of those things. Jenny that she had seen an article in the local newspaper a year earlier about an unusually large number of miscarriages and birth defects in the Fort Wolcott area that required late-term abortions. It had been a cause for some concern among the strongly anti-abortion right-wingers of the area, and also among environmentalists who feared some local pollutant was the problem.

The best medical option was an immediate early labor induction, given how close the fetus was to full term. It was an awful ordeal. Jenny left the hospital resigned to starting over again in her quest for conception, and aware that if she did not conceive in the next few years, she would remain childless. Mark would be understanding, but it wouldn’t help. She decided to raise the possibility of adoption with him that night.

Chapter 1

The earthquake struck without warning, silently shattering a rainy autumn night. It rumbled along a fault line deep beneath the mountains that Californians call the Coast Range, not far from the Pacific Ocean. The fissure, which would be named the Humboldt fault the following week by incredulous geologists, was still unknown as the earth’s plates began to slip against one another. The movement was, in geological terms, a muscle twitch. Nevertheless, it was the most powerful quake to hit California in the past thirty years. A 7.1 on the Richter scale, had the quake struck San Francisco it would have toppled the most seismically secure skyscrapers, and killed thousands. But the epicenter was in the foothills of rural Humboldt County, a hundred and fifty miles north of the Bay area and just over the hills from the ocean. It hit a region of ranches, wineries, and summer cabins that were largely empty for the off-season. The only nearby community was Fort Wolcott, which became eponymous for the quake. Nearly three minutes of violent shaking tore a number of Fort Wolcott’s old wooden frame houses from their foundations and pulverized brick buildings, which crumbled as the ground underneath was liquefied.

Above ground, it was three a.m. when the quake hit, and raining torrentially. The forecast of a major winter rainstorm had driven many off-season tourists south to Mendocino ahead of the approaching bad weather, where they could weather the storm in the comfort of a bed and breakfast inn. This exodus saved many lives. When the tourists left, canoe rentals and whitewater rafting outfitters closed up and went home too. This left the area’s small residential population small and sparsely distributed. Tourism was the only local business that most people knew about, although the area also supported a thriving agricultural industry centered around cherries and apricots in the summer and apples and pears in the Fall. The bulk of the picking was done by migrant farm workers from Mexico. The squalid bunkhouses they occupied during the growing season were mostly vacant too.

The largest building in the region housed another local industry, one that practically no one from outside the area knew about. The Pacific Regional Primate Research Center had been built in the sixties as overflow animal housing from the larger regional primate research facility at the University of California campus in Davis. At one time PRPRC was the national center for a government-sponsored breeding program for chimpanzees. The idea was that chimps, given their close genetic relatedness to humans, would make an ideal model for AIDS research. Unfortunately, only after a large number of chimps had been bred and infected with the HIV virus did it become apparent that chimps are poor AIDS models; only one of a hundred animals ever contracted the disease. The program was abolished after an aggressive campaign by animal rights advocates. Most of the apes were quietly euthanized - not many zoos are interested in having HIV-positive chimpanzees - and the whole episode was written off as a misguided government boondoggle. But the facility that had been built for the program remained, with a small maintenance staff to look after other primate species, plus a few scientists who continued their research. It occupied three white concrete windowless buildings built into a grassy mountain meadow, surrounded by several large indoor/outdoor enclosures attached to the two animal buildings. A long gravel driveway snaked its way down to the tarmac road, and a small cleared area next to Building One was still used as a heliport for the director and staff.

At night, only a skeleton crew of cleaners and security people were on hand at the Primate Center. They reacted casually to the first awakenings of the Humboldt Fault. Most were veterans of dozens of local quakes; at the first gentle rocking some made silent predictions (feels like a 4.2...) of this one’s magnitude. Then, as the rocking turned to jolting and the lights flickered, most of the staff dived for the nearest doorways and covered their heads from falling debris. Heating duct grates popped out loudly, wheeled furniture rolled across tile floors, and medical supplies vaulted out of glass cabinets and shattered loudly.

A moment later the lights failed. An emergency generator that was supposed to come on failed to do so, and the entire facility was thrown into blackness. The electronic security system in the animal facilities also failed, and as if in response to the fear screams of the macaque monkeys in Building Two, the cage locks popped open. The cages released most of the 400-some monkeys into cleaning rooms and corridors, where they ran into each other in the darkness, biting and clutching their neighbors in fear.

The jolting grew rapidly worse, and about seventy seconds after the shockwaves had begun, the first exterior wall crumbled. The facility was built on bedrock, thought to be relatively earthquake-safe, and the engineers had guaranteed structural integrity up to a temblor of 7.6 (this was larger than the worst quake expected in this fault-free area for the next millennium or more). But the Humboldt Fault was not taken into account, and moments later, one entire side of Building Two imploded. As it fell, an enormous slab of concrete swiped the exterior perimeter wall that served as the edge of the outdoor yard for the baboons. It crashed, taking high rolled-wire-topped fencing with it. This created a dark artery that went from the deepest sector of the building’s interior straight out into the meadow and pine forest that surrounded the facility.

The macaques, their eyes darting about in beet-red faces, poured from the building into a rain-swept night. They followed their arboreal instincts and took to the rooftops, where they ran up and down the steep ledges now lying a kilter, and stationed themselves on twisted rebar that jutted from the ruins of the building like harpoons from a whale. The baboons had been in the indoor section of their pen and so remained securely imprisoned. The few chimps that remained at PRPRC these days were also unable to flee; many were hepatitis C-infected experimental animals living an appalling existence in five foot square isolation cages in the bowels of the building. They were crushed in their cubicles or now whimpered helplessly as the rock and dust settled around them.

Two minutes and forty seconds after it started, the largest California earthquake in three decades was over. The mountains were black under the beating rain, and the rubble of the buildings lay in mud and water. Building One was still more or less intact, but without power. Buildings Two and Three no longer existed as such, and their hundreds of nonhuman inhabitants either lay twisted and crushed within the ruins, or were now scampering about in the night outside. The entire property on which the center sat was surrounded by one further outer perimeter fence that was electrified and topped with more razor wire. This imprisoned some of the macaques; even though the power had failed the razor wire discouraged escapees. Nevertheless, two hundred or more monkeys were freed into the enormous expanse of redwood forest that surrounded the facility.

The human staff of a dozen were concerned mainly for their own safety, and that of their families in the towns nearby. Of the five people who died in the Fort Wolcott quake, three were employees of PRPRC who failed