Author Note: I want to give a special thanks to my good friend in Australia who penned many of the later chapters including the ones with the girls and the one with everyone left on the base with the dogs. He added some wonderful pieces to the work and deserves his own special shout out. If you want to congratulate him, his email address is Starfire1951[att]hotmail.com.

My address is always infinteinkz[att]yahoo.com. Any comments, positive or negative are welcome. Tell us what you liked about it and what you didn't like. Keep reading and keep learning.

The Race of Man By Robert Scott MacLeod and Dean Hodgson

Prologue: --------

Let me state for the record that I never intended to change the world. I never meant to alter the course that human history had taken for hundreds of thousands of years. It all just sort of happened.

I guess that is really no excuse for what I did, but I do find some comfort in these facts when I look back at all the chaos my actions have caused. It's not much, but it keeps me going... well that... and the fact that I am getting more ass now than anyone ever dreamed of.

Chapter One: The Discovery --------------------------

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am, in all honesty and no modesty, a genius. I finished my bachelor's degree in anthropology when I was thirteen. I received my masters at fourteen and my doctorate when I was fifteen. I got my second doctorate in electronic engineering at seventeen and my third doctorate in microbiology by my nineteenth birthday. This was in addition to other assorted masters and bachelors' degrees that I picked up in my spare time.

I have a photographic memory and an almost infinite capacity for boredom. Also, at the age of 22, when all of this started, I was still very much a virgin. I like to think that I was not... unattractive at the time. I had brown hair that absolutely refused to cooperate with any comb or brush. My eyes were your basic hazel and I had good teeth. I was thin, but not skinny and kept a decent tan despite hours in labs and workshops. I just never seemed to find anyone that wanted to relieve me of my virginity.

Now when all of this started, I was working at USC in the Anthropology Department. My thesis on human evolutionary patterns had caught the attention of the department head and I had worked with him for almost a year to determine exactly where modern man had separated from his earlier relatives.

Needless to say that this was a daunting task since most scientists don't even agree which of the early stages of man are actually directly related to Homo sapiens. Still, it was an interesting exercise and it paid well. Then came the call that promised to make our job a hell of a lot easier.

We got word from a research team working on ice core samples in Antarctica that they had made an amazing discovery. While working in an ice crevasse they had discovered an entire group of proto-humans frozen in the ice. The pictures they had sent us were understandably grainy, but they showed at least six humanoids and they looked to be perfectly preserved.

Doctor Asburg, the department head, suspected that they were probably early Cro-Magnon or even perhaps Neanderthal. We all saw the amazing opportunity this was and Asburg arranged for the two of us and three research assistants to fly to the Antarctic to study this find first hand. Most of you probably doubt the likelihood of people being frozen in a block of ice in one of the coldest places in the world.

Well, before this discovery was made, corpses of other creatures had been discovered in both the Artic and Antarctic. Bodies of Wooly Mammoths had been discovered that had been frozen so quickly that uneaten plants still sat in their mouths and several small rodents had been discovered in the ice in the process of copulation. It theorized that sudden climactic shifts had caused such a rapid temperature drop that the creatures had been frozen before they had a chance to realize that they were dead.

Asburg and I believed that the same thing had happened to this group of early humanoids. (For a really good example of this effect, see if you can find a copy of the inaccurate, but highly entertaining movie, The Day After Tomorrow.) As we bordered our chartered flight, I studied the various members of our team.

Doctor William Asburg was the head of our team. He was 42 and the very epitome of your typical college professor. Slightly overweight with balding brown hair, he had green eyes that were usually hidden behind very thick glasses. He was one of the most respected authorities on early man in the world. He also played a really vicious game of handball.

Our budget wasn't good enough to cover real assistants, but we had managed to con three interns to come along with us for class credits. All three were freshmen and, from my vastly older years of 22, seemed to be very young. Barry Stone was the one I knew best. He looked like a linebacker, but had a brain like a researcher. We had teamed up a couple of times to complete some of Asburg's projects. He was six feet tall with more muscles than seemed fair. He had wavy red hair and deep blue eyes.

Angela Chen wasn't really an anthropology student. She was more like me and was too smart for her own good. She had started a degree in History, and then switched three more times. Anthropology was simply her latest interest. I suspected that she would eventually find her calling and become as famous as Einstein or Clark. For now, her magnificent brain was at our disposal.

Shamefully enough, her body was just as magnificent as her brain. Long blonde hair that was more than likely natural, breasts that would have shamed any pinup and a butt that you could rest a soda on was only three of the things that made her the subject of many of my masturbatory fantasies.

Paul Waters finished up our little group. Paul was working on his second master's degree and was the living embodiment of the stereotypical nerd. He was short, skinnier than a rail with an overbite so bad that he could probably eat both sides of an apple. He was probably the smartest member of our group, including me, and an absolute master at all things electronic.

Now this probably doesn't sound like the kind of people that would be safe flying off to one of the most inhospitable places in the world and if you are actually thinking that, well you are correct. The closest thing I had to artic experience was the winter break that I spent in Colorado learning to ski. The others had even less experience than that. However, Asburg didn't want to wait until the specimens could be brought back to the states. He was terrified that someone else would find out about this discovery and steal our thunder. So we were going to the Antarctic whether we were ready or not.

Our flight deposited us in the bustling city of McMurdo Station. McMurdo Station is Antarctica's largest community. It is built on the bare volcanic rock of Hut Point Peninsula on Ross Island, the farthest south solid ground that is accessible by ship. Established in 1956, it has grown from an outpost of a few buildings to a complex logistics staging facility of more than 100 structures including a harbor, an outlying airport (Williams Field) with landing strips on sea ice and shelf ice, and a helicopter pad. There are aboveground water, sewer, telephone, and power lines linking buildings.

It is not exactly Los Angeles, but it the closest thing to civilization you are going to find on the frozen continent. A heavily modified DC 11 and a thirty-year-old Sno-Cat that would be our base of operations during our investigation met us at Williams Field.

The pilot looked like a refugee from an old WWII movie with a pair of aviator glasses, Japanese bomber jacket and, God help us, a long white scarf. Still, he told us that he had been flying in this area for over twenty years so we felt fairly safe. We loaded the Sno-Cat and our gear onto the plane and took off. Our destination was over three hundred miles from our departure point and I swear we flew over the most deserted landscapes known to mankind. On a more modern aircraft in a friendlier environment, the flight would have taken about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.

Our transport was far from modern and our surroundings were hardly friendly. We battled headwinds of unbelievable speeds and turbulence that would make even the most seasoned flyer sick to their stomach. Poor Paul must have gone through at least ten airsick bags during the four-hour trip. When we began to make our approach, all you could really see from the air were snow, ice, and more snow. There was definitely nothing that looked like a landing strip. Nevertheless, our pilot set us down with only a few jolts from the landing skids.

The research team helped us unload the Cat and stow our gear in the dozen or so geodesic domes that served as their living quarters and labs. We would be sharing their quarters for the duration of our stay, but any research we were to do would be done in the back of the massive snow vehicle. This wasn't a major concern to us considering the main problem we would be presented with would be keeping any specimens we recovered frozen and safely preserved until they could be examined or sent back home. Well, when the average mean temperature rarely got above -45 degrees, keeping things frozen was not a problem. Hell, keeping us from freezing could become a problem.

It took us about twelve hours to get everything set up, then Doctor Asburg insisted that we all get at least nine hours of sleep. None of us wanted to miss a minute, but we followed the doctor's orders.

The next day, we shared breakfast with the researchers and then piled into the Cat with two of the research team for the two-hour drive to the crevasse where the bodies were found. They were extremely talkative and the woman, April Sanderson, actually seemed interested in me. I suspect that it was more because I was a new face then because she actually thought I was sexy. She'd been staring at the same faces for nearly a year so I would guess that Quasimodo would have looked good to her. Still it was fun having an attractive woman flirting with me. Made me almost forget the thirty-mile per hour winds blowing outside and the fact that it was a balmy -50 degrees.

The crevasse was pretty obvious. It was a massive black cut in the nearly perfect white of the surrounding snow and ice. April told us that the group had discovered it over two months ago and had been using it for easier access to the deeper pack ice. She said that their sonar had picked up a large opening directly beneath the area that they had been mining so they had set charges to blow an opening. They had hoped to get even deeper into the pack ice without much effort. They had found something far beyond their expectations.

I thought I was prepared for what they had discovered after having seen the pictures they had sent. When we followed them down the metal scaffolding to the lower level, I realized that I had been wrong. Even through the distortion of the ice, they were magnificent. The lights set up by the researchers illuminated a scene straight out of prehistory. No one spoke as we studied the figures. It was like we all felt that speaking would somehow break the magical spell holding these long dead creatures here in our time. It was so quiet that I could hear everyone breathing and the quiet dripping of water freed from the ice by the heat of the lights and our bodies.

"I count eight of them," Asburg said, breaking the silence finally. He was shining his flashlight into the ice and studying the frozen forms. "Four of them approximately four feet tall, two perhaps a half foot taller and the remaining two seem to be children."

"Maybe a family grouping?" Angela was filming what we could see with her digital camera. She seemed completely in awe of the scene and kept fingering the cross dangling from her ample bosom. I was wearing my Star of David under my parka and felt the urge to follow her action. There was something almost religious about what we were seeing. Like we were being given a glimpse at some of God's earliest work. "I thought that family groupings were much larger in early man? Didn't they run around in large groups, basically entire tribes of interrelated people?" Paul was using his Palmtop to make notations on positions of the various figures and any viewable features.

Asburg nodded. "Sites in Europe and Asia have always indicated that family groups usually consisted of thirty to forty persons. It's possible that this group is survivors of some disaster that wiped out the rest of their group. It's also possible that they were exiled from their group for some reason or another. Unfortunately for us, I doubt we will ever know the reason why there are so few of them. They didn't exactly keep written records, you know."

Everyone laughed at his little joke, except Paul who had gotten very close to the ice wall and was peering at the figures intently. They don't look like Cro-Magnon or even Neanderthal?"

I joined him and tried to get a better look at the figures. "He's right, Doctor. I can't see them very clearly, but they don't seem to have any of the features of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, or even Homo erectus. Do you think it's possible that we have stumbled across an entirely new species of early man?"

Asburg waved his hands to quell the excited muttering that had started when I asked that. "Let's not get too excited here, folks. We won't know anything for sure until we can extract some of them and study them. Since no one has ever actually seen any of the early hominids as anything except bones, it is possible that they could be one of the known species. So until we know more, I don't want anyone speculating. We are scientists, not tabloid writers.

As excited as we all were, we nodded at his logic and began the laborious process of chipping away the ice and freeing some specimens for study back at the base. We had to be incredibly careful because the ice was very dense and the bodies were going to be very fragile. We extracted two of the larger ones and one of the ones that we believed might be children and carefully packed them back to the base to begin our studies.

Now, I will be nice and leave out the details of our research. Hours of long and very tedious work in our makeshift labs, repeating the same test dozens of times to make sure you got the right answer was the majority of our days. Asburg insisted that everyone confirm every test. I understood, especially once we realized what we had discovered. We had stumbled across something that we knew was going to shake the scientific community to the very core and there was no way in Hell that Asburg was going to let even the tiniest mistake slip by to give doubters and naysayers ammunition to discredit our discovery.

During the two weeks that we worked, the only real thing of interest that happened was that I finally lost my virginity. Since I am certain that most of you are reading this only for the sexual content and not for the scientific information, I will do my best to let you know how, pardon the very bad pun, climactic this event was.

I was working late into the night studying cell samples and blood samples from our specimens. Since I was the only microbiologist on the team, it was my duty to study the amazingly preserved cultures we extracted. Needless to say, I was in Heaven to be able to study the biology of creatures that had died out long before modern man had taken his first steps on this planet. What I had discovered was beyond belief and the things that I would discover would be even more incredible, but more on that later.

I had just finished studying a slide of cell samples from one of the smaller creatures when I heard the lab door slide open very quietly, as if someone had been trying to make the corrugated steel door move as silently as possible, as if the blast of freezing air as the door opened wouldn't have let me know that the door had been opened.

We had backed the Cat up to one of the doors leading to the main dome and had constructed a temporary hallway out of pressed plastic sheets and metal stakes. This kept most of the winds off of us when we were going from the domes to the Cat, but it was still very cold outside. I turned, expecting Asburg or one of my team checking in on me.

I was very surprised to see April standing there, slowly unzipping her parka. Any questions I might have had were stifled when I realized that the courageous woman had braved the sub-zero temperatures without anything under her parka. She dropped the heavy coat to the floor of the Cat and smiled at me.

My first cognizant thought was that the old joke about, "Is it cold in here" was definitely based in fact. Her more than ample bosom was covered in goose pimples and her dark brown nipples looked hard enough to chip diamond. The anthropologist in me immediately identified her as being of almost pure Nordic descent. She had very light brown hair and the palest skin that I had ever seen. Her visible skin seemed to be dotted with an infinite number of light brown freckles and her ice blue eyes seemed to be laughing at me as I stared at her.