No figurine for this one.
The teaching set encoded domains the Picts had accessed—continental, marine, the depths they'd mapped through generations of practice. But human evolution was too recent, too shallow, too close. The Picts hadn't needed silver to navigate their own ancestors.
"Target depth: 3.2 million years before present," ARCHIE announced. "Pliocene epoch. East African Rift Valley."
Susan stood on her platform, watching the landscape resolve. After the Devonian springs and the Silurian seas, she'd thought she was prepared for anything. She wasn't prepared for this.
The savanna stretched to the horizon under an African sky that looked almost modern. Acacia trees dotted the grassland. A lake glittered in the middle distance.
"It looks like home," David said quietly.
"It is home." Susan's voice caught. "This specific landscape. The rift valley where the first hominids diverged from the apes. We're standing at the origin point of everything human."
"Movement at bearing 045," ARCHIE reported. "Multiple individuals. Bipedal locomotion. Consistent with Australopithecus afarensis morphology."
Susan turned and saw them emerge from a stand of trees near the lakeshore.
There were perhaps a dozen of them.
Small by human standards—the tallest might have reached Susan's shoulder—with proportions that fell into an uncanny valley between ape and human. They walked upright, their gait recognizable as bipedal but subtly wrong, th…
