The Gravedigger

Over the past five million years an animal has been evolving down a novel path, setting in motion a series of events that would change the world... if just for a while.

5 Million Years Ago

The world 5 million years ago, halfway between the current time period and the last we visited, was already cooling considerably, but much of the land was still host to mild climate and verdant forest. Forests still covered most of Serinarcta, and the abundant trees were browsed by herds of countless species of antlears - deer-like circuagodonts which had evolved mobile grasping appendages from their ears. Antlears evolved at the very tail end of the Pangeacene and spread across Serina in the early Ultimocene. They were, like all circuagodonts, social animals, and they were reasonably intelligent. Their primary predators were their close relatives the circuagodogs and a few species of carnivorous tentacle birds - grapplers. These were threats that the antlear had evolved alongside and adopted countering behaviors to escape. They were not successful at all times - not at all, for if they were they would have become so abundant as to strip the forest bare of vegetation with their tree-trimmer-like jaws. But these were threats the antlears, at the level of populations, were adapted to survive.

What they never could have anticipated was the enemy that appeared suddenly and blindsided them around this time - a creature that used not speed nor stealth nor brute force, but rather an astonishing degree of planning and foresight to capture them in a way they were utterly helpless to avoid. Beneath their noses, and all but overshadowed by the many larger and more impressive apex predators of the world, the gravedigger appeared nearly instantly out of seemingly nowhere as the antlear's most successful predator - a species so effective at what it did that it caused the extinction of at least one species entirely within just a few thousand years.

The southern gravedigger, the nominate subspecies, evolved to live along equatorial environments in the middle Ultimocene.

The gravedigger did not evolve out of nothing in an instant of course. This is not how evolution occurs. Rather its family can be traced back more than 25 million years to the Pangeacene; the gravedigger was a member of the aberrant quadrupedal bird clade known as the bumblebadgers, a group of birds descended from mole-like burrowers that evolved their flexible weight-bearing wrists to replace the rest of their forearms and lost their hard-shelled eggs for true live birth. The gravedigger had scarcely changed at all physically from the earliest bumblebadgers; a stocky animal, about as big as a bulldog, it was not a fast runner, instead built for burrowing and feeding on carrion and small animals found underground. It could never catch a healthy antlear in a chase, and though it had a fearsome demeanor and a good ability to bluff its way into stealing other predators' kills, what really allowed it to so suddenly appear as an apex predator was behavioral innovation. While other predators evolved sharper teeth, longer claws and other physical adaptations to catch their prey, the gravedigger was developing a bigger brain with which it could then solve the problems of living in novel ways with tools and technique, without having to wait for evolution to reshape its body.

And what it learned to do was to make traps.

It did not have to hide from its prey because they did not regard the small plodding creature with the bold and easily seen spotted and striped coat as a threat; this allowed the gravedigger to live among the herds, get to know their behavior and their routines, and to use it against them. Taking note of trails the herds took daily, while they bedded down to sleep under cover of darkness it returned to memorized sites and dug deep pits into the earth with its powerful arm claws. It broke saplings, using its powerful pseudotoothed-beak to strip the bark to a sharp point and partially burying these sticks at the bottom. Just before dawn, the sneaky hunter would line the pit with still more branches, overlaid with grass until the trap was virtually invisible. And then it merely wandered off. The antlear herds passed by, uninterested. Unknowing. The gravedigger had never chased or harried them, so they paid it no attention as it followed at a distance behind them. He watches with a sideways glance before slipping out of sight into the tall grass as they edge nearer and nearer... until one of the herd steps just a little too far. A paw slips through a deceptively unstable cover of greenery. A loud thud, a plaintive cry, and a herd scattering in all directions from a threat it cannot see. And when they are all run away, the gravedigger emerges at the edge of a deep pit to find a very sizeable meal skewered like a kebab at the bottom of a hole that had not been there the day before.

He climbs down to eat.

The gravedigger of five million years ago was a very smart animal. But it was also a solitary one, and had lost even the pair-bonding nature of other bumblebadgers around the time they began to develop complex hunting behaviors. Fiercely territorial, gravediggers of either sex now only tolerated one another for the time it took to mate when the call of passion temporarily overrode their innate drive to fight their own kind. This was a necessary change of of behavior, because a given patch of forest could only provide so many kills, and there was no benefit to cooperating when one individual could build an entire new trap in a single night. But it also complicated passing down the increasingly complex behaviors that they had begun to rely upon, which had no ingrained genetic basis.

The only meaningful social bond in any gravediggers' life that remained was the one-year-long relationship between a mother and her single offspring. During this period of life a high concentration of motherly hormones released after birth temporarily suppressed her natural territoriality toward her young and instilled a fiercely protective drive in her. To make the most of a short childhood, the young gravediggers had evolved a particularly open mind to new things for the first year of life, where they could rapidly learn and retain information almost photographically. This way, their mothers could demonstrate all of the complex survival skills that they would need to survive on their own as adults and the young could pick them up in just a matter of months primarily through imitation. During this window of development the young would soak up information like a sponge, and for good reason; after its first thirteen months of life, the window would close and the gravedigger would be virtually unable to learn any new skills it did not figure out before this milestone. As its mothers parental hormones dropped off, she would drive him off into the world alone, and he would never again form any lasting social bond. With luck he would have learned all the skills he would ever need during his youth. Quite likely, while in this more curious mental state he would possibly have also innovated his own new twists on his mother's behavior - things she would never be able to do, already set in her ways, that might make her techniques even more effective. It was in this way that gravedigger culture spread very slowly, but cumulatively, over hundreds and thousands of years.

And so gravediggers' trap-building behavior was not something that appeared overnight: it likely took many generations of modification to perfect. It may have originated accidentally when a prey animal tripped into the entrance to the den which one gravedigger mother and her offspring lived and broke its leg; the memory of such an accidental windfall of food would have stuck with the young one, who would have possibly learned that prey could be tripped with purposely-placed holes and begun digging them purposely. Over thousands of years, females of each generation (as males would not pass on any learned behavior) would modify techniques taught by their own mothers a little better until, roughly 5 million years ago, the line of skilled trap-builders that lined their pits with spears and disguised them along game trails became the most dominant lineage in one particularly important place - the coastal woodland that would become the south Serinarctan forest refugia, along the north shores of the Icebox Seaway - where it worked extraordinarily well.

But over time, their very success would begin to backfire upon them.