The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(63)

I glance back at the skulls, trying to grasp what I missed. Seaver picks up the middle one and drops it back into my hands. The face still tells the same story. This one is European, by all indications. I look for any other features, examining the teeth for dental variations. I can’t spot any.

I rotate the skull to look at the occipital bone. There’s a correlation between thickness and shape among races. In whites you can often see sex dimorphism—tell the males from the females—by features on this bone.

It’s just above the bone that I see what Seaver is trying to get me to see: a massive fracture. I examine the other skulls and find similar trauma.

“They were all murdered.”

“Exactly. And in the same way: blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull. Not the kind of thing you do in battle. It’s the way you kill someone in a kneeling or prone position. In my research, approximately 25 percent of the deaths in prehistoric burial sites come from violence. Statistically speaking, outside of infant disease, the number-one cause of death was another human doing the killing.

“This is the norm up until the development of agriculture. Even then, violence didn’t steeply curve until the age of reason. And this violence wasn’t committed by a statistical few. It was regular folks. Once upon a time I might have been the one holding this person down while you clubbed them in the back of the skull.”

I’m unsettled by the casual way he suggests this. I get the impression he’s imagined this scenario quite a lot.

He lines the skulls up in a row. Their haunted eye sockets stare out at us.

Seaver points to them, calling out their backstories one by one. “This one was murdered six thousand years ago in what’s now Hungary. This one died three thousand years ago in China. This one died one thousand years ago in Wyoming. This one was sent to me by the Genocide Project; the victim was from a mass burial in Darfur five years ago. The last one was found in the woods in Colorado twenty years ago. We still don’t know who they were or why they were killed.”

“Savage,” I reply.

“No, Dr. Cray.” Seaver shakes his head. “That’s the point. These are far from the most savage deaths I’ve come across. These are the humane ones. They were killed dispassionately. I have other skulls and bones with hack marks and stab wounds inflicted long after the victim was deceased. I have collarbones with tooth indentations, not from cannibalism, but from someone trying to bite the victim to death, after they were incapacitated. I can show you murder sites that would make the most hardened Nazi concentration camp commander want to vomit.” He waves at the skulls. “This is killing. Murder is what you’re interested in.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to. You divorce your wife because you don’t love her. You murder her because you hate her.”

The man who killed Juniper certainly took great pleasure in the act. He could have strangled her or slit her throat. But he didn’t. The act of killing was his purpose. Which leads me back to the method.

“Have you ever heard of someone making a murder look like an animal attack?”

“Disguising it after the fact?”

“No. Killing someone in the same way an animal would.”

“Virtually all acts of premeditated killing in warfare involve some kind of animal symbolism. Animal mascots for military units. Wearing animal claws and teeth. Prehistoric man would wear the skins of other predators to assume their powers.”

“What about the act of killing itself? Are there cases where someone has consciously used killing methods like an animal’s?”

“Ah, that’s more challenging. Up until when we went out into the savanna, we were opportunistic omnivores that only ate things much smaller than ourselves. We had to invent the spear and throwing projectiles because our teeth and fingernails weren’t adapted to hunting.

“Mimicry would be a very inefficient way for someone to try to kill, with a few exceptions.”

“Exceptions? Such as?”

“Certain weapons that would resemble the way an animal would strike.”

“Like what?”

“Follow me.”





CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE


SHARK TEETH

Seaver guides me to a different part of the basement and takes a dusty cardboard box down from a towering shelf. He lifts the lid and reveals a flat club with triangular white teeth sticking out around the sides, like a chain saw blade.

“In Hawaii they call this a leiomano. They use tiger shark teeth for the blades. It’s somewhat similar to the obsidian macuahuitl clubs they used in Mesoamerica. This one was found in a mound in Illinois. The teeth were from a great white shark. The Mound Builders obviously traded far and wide to have access to those.”

He hands me the club. The tips of the teeth are still sharp. I’d hate to have this slice into me.

“The amusing thing about this is that some anthropologists regard this as a more humane weapon than a sword, proof in their minds that their wielders were more kindhearted than we give them credit for. The reality is that this is the kind of weapon you make if you don’t have iron or bronze. When you get cut by this, you die of infection from a hundred different wounds you can’t sew up as easily as one gash.”