The Conch: A primitive cult of the glowing tool

Millennia from now, when archaeologists are picking over the bones of our lost civilisation, what will they find?

The first thing they are likely to notice as they brush the soil away from a human figure discovered hunched in a burial mound in what carbon dating will pinpoint as the restaurant piazza in Rosebank in the year 2050 or thereabouts, is how diminished that figure is: deeply rounded shoulders and short arms that taper inwards - as if the human were holding something small with both hands.

 The hands will be bent, clawlike appendages, notable for having prominent, multi-jointed thumbs. The hominid's eyes will be close-set, almost Cyclopean, the devolutionary result of years of looking at something close to its face.

The searchers will use chisels to delicately pry small, oblong tools from the curved claws of the hunched hominids. These super-slim devices will be encased in what laboratory analysis will later reveal to be those ancient yet ubiquitous materials "glass", "aluminium" and "plastic". Some may retain faint and meaningless script: "i-S-u-n-g" or "N-o-k-i-r-o-l-a". The tools will be found in all burial mounds, especially those in the Piazza Excavation.

Other excavations where hominids are discovered in communal burial mounds will reveal the same. Always the stunted shapes and the mysterious tools. Despite the application of the best minds in science and archaeology, there will be widespread bafflement as to what those tools were for. There will be no Rosetta Stone on this dig.

All they will know for certain is that wherever hominids were found buried in close proximity to each other, they will all be found clutching - indeed, staring at - these tools.

"What a strange, sad civilisation this seems to have been," the archaeologists will say. "Backward, really. Almost not a civilisation at all."

Then, one day, a dedicated young researcher working in the dusty vaults of human history will discover the story of Easter Island. She will learn how the islanders, obsessed with an ancestor cult under which the dead would provide for every need, cut down all the trees on the island, turning their paradise into a wilderness on which they starved to death.

Could there be, she will wonder, a link between the Easter Island cult and these lonesome, tool-bearing hominids now being dug out of burial mounds all over the planet?

And so she will advance a tentative theory which academia will soon latch onto because, by the gods, what other explanation could there be? The people of this civilisation turned the tools into gods and worshipped them.

The worship reached fever pitch wherever they gathered in public and it rapidly eclipsed all the other trappings of civilisation: conversation, laughter, lovemaking and - eventually - eating and drinking and caring about the human race.

Thus this civilisation will go down in history as the one that failed because the hominids were too busy worshipping their tools. The irony that the tools were in fact communication devices will likely be lost. LS