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of our human past, but the further back we go, the more we see what an incomplete picture we have of human history.
    There was another odd burial at Dolní Věstonice, this one of an older woman. She was found in a fetal position under the shoulder blades of a mammoth, near a fox skeleton, and scientists said her facial bones indicated paralysis on the left side of her face. Also found nearby at Dolní Věstonice: a carved ivory head and an ivory plaque with an incised face, and get this—both had faces that droop on the left. The carved head was the size of a thumb, and “that ivory would have taken dozens of hours to carve,” Shea said with respect. That woman was somebody.
    The people of Dolní Věstonice might seem cryptic and strange, but reaching back twice as far, to the Middle Paleolithic’s Neandertals and then even further by hundreds of thousands of years, first to Homo heidelbergensis and then to Homo erectus , was like watching a badly damaged, flickering black-and-white time travelogue. Neandertals ranged across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant) into Russia, and lived in caves. Did they live in other dwellings, too? We know only about the ones preserved in caves. For a time, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both inhabited the Levant; then, for a significant period between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens disappeared from the archaeological record in this area. Again, who knows why?
    Did Neandertals and Homo sapiens reproduce with each other? This is the hot question ever since a laboratory sequenced the Neandertal genome in 2010 and scientists announced that a small percentage of Eurasian DNA could be traced to Neandertals. The results percolated down to the popular press—“It’s Fred, Wilma—And You!” and “Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?” As with most paleoanthropological news, though, the conclusion was soon challenged. Do humans carry traces of Neandertal genes because they interbred or because they shared a common ancestor? Evolutionary genetics “is a young science,” Shea noted. “They only got Neandertal DNA in 1996. The jury’s still out.” To an archaeologist, that’s like yesterday. The laboratory at the Max Planck Institutefor Evolutionary Anthropology, which sequenced the genome, * has a stellar reputation, Shea acknowledged, but his experience with laboratories overall is not reassuring: “All you have to do is look sideways at a sample to contaminate it.” From an archaeological perspective, “There is no clear and convincing proof that either hominin set eyes on the other.” You never find these people’s tools or bones in the same place at the same time. He refers to Neandertals as “our cousins” and conceded, “At most, the Neandertals are ancestral only to some of us.” He attributed part of the fascination with the species to the fact that their remains are easy to find and there are lots of specimens, and also to European scientists’ traditional preference for excavating in their own backyard, within easy reach of wine, cheese, and pâté.
    WHAT REALLY INTERESTED Shea were the tools, and there were places, like the caves he helped excavate in Israel, where there was evidence that Homo sapiens had used the same kinds of knives and tools as Neandertals. “The complex projectile weapons seem to be uniquely Homo sapiens , though,” he said. “Neandertals don’t seem to have used them.”
    Through Shea’s vivid descriptions, I finally learned to distinguish a few of the tangled branches of the human tree. Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis . Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis , lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, “flinging shit