And don’t find you.
Where have you hidden, precarious synthesis,
Pledge of my sleep, light? "
(Carlos Drummond de Andrade)
In front of the forest where Monkey Glass and his peers had lived, staring it like an emerald sky harnessed by angels, stayed a mountain range that towered above all nature with its peaks dressed in white. Heaving, the group climbed the steep paths that led to the top of the range. A mist involved them, which thickened as the density of the air decreased.
- We cannot take more walking. We’d better seek shelter, said Glass.
The others assented so unanimously that the slightest objection was not heard. No one deemed it necessary to add anything to the conclusion arrived at by Monkey Glass, for it mirrored the thoughts of all. Immediately, they began to look for a cave, a den, a covered, albeit meager, where they could take refuge. After sweeping the place as thoroughly as their strength allowed, they finally spotted a lair that seemed carved in the wall of a lift. Submitted and stooped by exhaustion, they plunged into it, without saying a word.
Soon, they were sound asleep. And as had been the rule since the beginning of the march, when woke up they feasted with a few fruits subtracted from the trees they found. They also drank mouthfuls of water. At the end, feeling as if they had swallowed courage, they started attacking the summit.
Under sunlight, they made more progress than in the whole day before. By noon, they had reached the largest glacier in the region and started to explore it. Meanwhile, Monkey Earthenware spotted something resembling a rock of ice, half a mile away. Changing his route in an oblique direction, he went steadfastly to the intriguing formation. But halfway, he suddenly shouted:
- Run! Come see whether I rave or there is a Mammoth in the ice!
- Heavens! exclaimed Monkey Glass. A Mammoth real! And a Man with him!
The Man inside the piece had his arm extended toward one of the Mastodon’s horn, as if he had seized it the moment he died.
Monkey Tile ventured:
- Must have been swept away by waters which froze. The Man clung to the Mammoth tusk as to a lifeline.
Earthenware lucubrated:
- May have died at different times: first the Mammoth, then the Man.
In an instant, Glass remembered and exclaimed:
- But Mammoths went extinct thousands of years ago! The frozen Man we see wears modern-day pants and coat. His aspect is fully current. No, it’s not possible that Mammoths lived with contemporary Man!
– How come it’s not possible, my brother, if we see them side by side? Potsherd asked. They could not have been frozen together, if they did not live and die at the same time.
The other Monkeys were silent, at the flawless logic of Potsherd. How could they deny it? It fell to Monkey Glass to draw the irrepressible conclusion:
- Potsherd, if you are right, this ice cube is the most important evidence of cultural evolution ever found. It shows that contemporary Man was also prehistoric.
- More than this, it shows that a culture similar to today’s existed thousands of years ago, Potsherd added.
- But no advanced culture may have existed thousands of years ago, said Glass. And he added, after thinking some more:
- If present-day artifacts existed millennia ago, where are the remains of cars, shuttles, buildings, bridges and other constructions of so ancient a civilization? And why so old people did not leave written records? Why they did not write about their fantastic achievements and even on the Mammoths of their time?
If Potsherd had expressed himself with property, the response of Monkey Glass was not inferior. The literary estate of all times attests to the absence of ultra-advanced artifacts in Prehistory. And no remains of those artifacts have been found. However, the evidence of the coexistence of today's Man and the Mammoths was within that block of ice, exposed to the gaze of the four friends. And it seemed irrefutable.
Glass said with wondering eyes:
- No animal from the past was as well preserved as the Man and the Mammoth before us. If we turn the world’s fossil deposits upside down, we won’t find one as conserved as these. And still, we don’t want to believe what our eyes see…
He continued:
- The idea that human culture evolved from simple to complex stages became a paradigm. The question is what is needed to contradict a paradigm. What evidence should be considered sufficient to support the abolition of a scientific model with the set of beliefs and assumptions it originates?
Earthenware intervened:
- This large block of ice seems to provide answer to your questions. It shows us that modern Man coexisted with Mammoths. This is well proven. But the proof is embedded in a body of evidence which is much larger and says exactly the opposite.
- Yes, Glass agreed, the body of evidence accumulated so far ensures us that modern Man and Mammoths never lived together. But should we believe in it or in the block right before us?
- I do not think the answer should be based on the number of proofs on each side, Potsherd replied. If so, there are thousands of proofs that modern humans did not coexist with Mammoths and only one in the opposite direction: the block of ice in front of us. However, empirical truth is not formed by the number of confirmations. On the contrary, it can be produced either by one or by many proofs. One piece of evidence of high value can disprove a heap of fragile ones.
The discussion thus initiated lasted long. If we say that the authors of the great discovery reached a conclusion, after discussing, we will miss the truth. But something related to the object of their investigation was laid on their minds: the larger the reach of a theory, the greater its resistance to refutation. Up to the point the belief in the theory becomes obsessive.
While plunged in these thoughts, the friends grew suspicious that evolution from simple to complex forms of culture were not to be shattered by the tremendous discovery they had made. Even though scientists investigated the ice block to the core, the paradigm of cultural evolution would not be threatened. It seemed the evolution of Monkeys, Men from common ancestors was one of these extremely broad ideas of human mind that cannot be proved or disproved. It means that all Men, Monkeys and the cultures of all times evolved from those ancestors. The Monkeys trembled at the thought that, under certain conditions, a theory so extended cannot be challenged by facts and becomes a truth a priori. A real creed.
These thoughts infused secret horror into the friends. Monkeys are accustomed to seek food, or more generally to think in terms of practical difficulties, such as deserving peanuts or popcorn from Men at the zoo. Of the three questions with which a human is tortured (Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going to?), only the latter interested to Monkeys in the last million years, yet in a direction a lot different from that in which Men have dealt with it. Even when exceeding all limits, Monkeys at most arrive at precarious syntheses. And soon they lose sight of them, as the prey which escapes the clutches the instant it falls on them.
For all this, in a dash of intuition, the friends judged unwise to join a science like that of Men, with claims of universal validity. It seemed more likely that the precarious synthesis they were looking for lay outside of the universal places of that science. It might not be safe to conclude that all Monkeys came or did not come from this or that ancestral species. The Simian could have different ancestral connections. They could derive from more than one species. As well as facts could comprise more exceptions to scientific laws than Men usually think.
