Clinging to the southwest face of Annapurna, the climber cuts another handhold. Suddenly, everything goes still - then the mountain roars, shaking loose its killing load, tumbling the climber before it. In an ice cave high in the Himalayas, a perfectly preserved skull is found. A fossil from a long-ago era, it is neither ape nor man.
In a lab on the Berkeley campus, a paleoanthropologist learns that what she took to be a fossil find of the first order is in fact the scientific discovery of a lifetime - proof of an alternative line of hominid development.
Philip Kerr spins a tale in which science, politics, and human frailty combine to take us on a stunning foray into the wilder shores of evolution, leaving us to speculate uneasily about the true nature of man.