The Hero by Lee Child

Author:Lee Child
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-10-16T20:39:24+00:00

Europe’s human population recovered over the course of many generations, until the woman standing, say, 500 places behind my grandma found herself living in a relatively stable situation. The details of her life had changed a little, compared to the women earlier in line. There was less hunting of large animals, and more of small animals, exploiting further advances in very small stone tools and weapons. There was wider-spread and more variegated gathering of produce. Probably she lived on the coast or a riverbank, where the food supply was richest and most various. She didn’t know it, and she certainly wouldn’t have cared, but by then she was living in what future archaeologists would call the Mesolithic – the Middle Stone Age, from the Greek mesos, middle, and lithos, stone – which was a short ten-thousand-year interval before things changed again. It was a simple, straightforward, satisfactory lifestyle.

Her location was her only real problem. Way north of where she was, out of sight and out of mind (and certainly beyond Mesolithic comprehension) the mile-thick ice sheets were still melting, and sea levels were rising. Perhaps she lived in a fertile valley bottom near a rushing river, with plenty of fish, and game in the copses, and ruminants wandering the wild pastures, and roots and berries galore. All good. Except now that’s the bottom of the North Sea. Possibly her fifty-times great granddaughter was the first to notice. She had to move up the hill a little. And then again. As it happens she went west. As did her daughter, and her granddaughter, and her great granddaughter, and so on, until eventually the woman 400 places behind my grandma arrived on a landmass we would recognize as shaped like modern Britain. She brought everything with her, everything she had inherited from the two thousand breeding pairs who had survived the glaciation, plus everything the subsequent four hundred generations had learned and passed on. She brought brains, language, reality-based planning, a ferocious will to live, and a deep love of story.

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