

By the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the last tool-making hominid on earth, anatomically modern, brains 5 percent larger than our own.

I’d be from a clan of cave painters and valley dwellers, people working mammoth ivory into eyed sewing needles for their clothes. Maybe she was thinking more recently, the Wisconsin Ice Age, late Pleistocene. We all have deeply rooted ancestry somewhere in the world. Imagine Homo heidelbergensis hunkered at the mouth of a natural rock shelter 700,000 years ago, pondering how to feed his children, or a Neanderthal thumbing out flower petals over the grave of a dead relative, dusting it with pollens, laying down pieces of ochre. I can’t recall the number of caves I’ve slept in there’ve been many. I can carry much weight through high passes and rocky canyons. I am a bearded, trunky fellow, strong legs and back. A former in-law came online a few days back to call me a troglodyte, and then a caveman.
