Read Online Prophet of Bones by Ted Kosmatka - Free Book Online

mainstream. The fossil KNM-ER 1470, found in Kenya, appeared so perfectly balanced between man and un-man that an additional category had to be invented: near man. The arguments could get quite heated, with both sides claiming anthropometric statistics to prove their case.
    Like a benevolent teacher swooping in to stop a playground fight, the science of genetics arrived on the scene. Occupying the exact point of intersection between the slopes of Paul’s two passions in life—genetics and anthropology—the field of paleometagenomics was born.
    And here he found his calling.
    He received a bachelor’s degree in May and started a graduate program in September. A year later, there came a letter and an airline ticket, and a company called Westing flew him to the East Coast for a job interview.
    They sat in a conference room. The company logo was a DNA double helix.
    “I won’t finish my master’s for another six months,” he told them, confused by the offer.
    “We’re more interested in ability than academic credentials,” the chief interviewer said. “The schools can’t keep up. Field techniques are obsolete by the time the textbooks are printed. If you want to see the curriculum three years early, sign our employment contract.”
    “This is all moving so fast.”
    The interviewer smiled. “Like the field itself.”
    They shook hands over a glossy table.
    Three weeks after that, he was in the field in Tanzania, sweating under an equatorial sun, collecting samples for later laboratory analysis. He drank quinine water by the gallon and dodged malaria.
    They flew him back and forth between labs and dig sites.
    All the while, he worked closely with his team, learning the proprietary techniques for extracting DNA from bones that were fifty-eight hundred years old.
    Bones from the very dawn of the world.

9
    The flight to Bali was seventeen hours, and another two to Flores by chartered plane—then four hours by jeep over the steep mountains and into the heart of the jungle. To Paul, it might have been another world. Rain fell, then stopped, then fell again, turning the road into a thing which had to be reasoned with.
    “Is it always like this?” Paul asked.
    “No,” Gavin said. “In the rainy season, it’s much worse.”
    The jeep slalomed along the rutted track, throwing rooster tails of black mud as it negotiated the pitched landscape.
    Paul gripped the jeep’s roll bar to steady himself and stared out into the thick growth that slid past on both sides of the road.
    Flores, isle of flowers. From the air it had looked like a green ribbon of jungle thrust out of blue water, a single bead in the rosary of islands that stretched between Australia and Java. Sulawesi lay to the north, New Guinea to the northeast. The Wallace line—a line more real than any border scrawled across a map—lay miles to the west, toward Asia and the empire of placental mammals. But here a stranger emperor ruled.
    Paul was exhausted by the time they pulled into Ruteng. He rubbed his eyes. Children ran alongside the jeep, their faces some compromise between Malay and Papuan: brown skin, strong white teeth like a dentist’s dream. The town crouched with one foot in the jungle, one on the mountain. A valley flung itself from the edge of the settlement, a drop of kilometers.
    The jeep wound its way through the crowded streets, past shops, and houses, and thronging tent bazaars, past smaller clapboard structures whose function Paul could only guess at. Small vans and motorbikes shouldered each other for space at intersections, horns blaring. If there were driving laws, Paul couldn’t deduce them from the available data.
    Rail-thin pariah dogs lurked in the gaps between buildings. Paul noted their colors with a geneticist’s eye, reading their genes as they picked through the garbage, tails curved upward over their bony hips. The yellow one was Ay; the black-and-tan, at/at. And others: E/m, bb, s/i. He saw no solid blacks. That color