Esau

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.

Three hundred miles away in the Punjab, Pakistan and India rattle their nuclear arsenals, edging ever closer to catastrophe. And 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 alternate line of hominid development. Missing Link. Yeti. New Species. Hairy Man. Call it what you will. Call it Esau.