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everywhere”—and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. “Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought,” Shea riffed. “If you were going to cast Jersey Shore , you’d go with heidelbergensis .”
    The even more ancient Homo erectus , the tall thin guys who ran down their prey like wolves, began in Africa between a million and two million years ago. Most Homo erectus fossils, creepily, are missing part of the skull. Were they eaten? I think of the comic Louis C.K., another guy with a somewhat Neandertal build, who reminds us that we don’t have to worry about being hunted and eaten on our way to work every day. “We got out of the food chain!” he crows. “That is a massive upgrade.”
    And then there was Homo floresiensis . The three-foot-tall hobbits are a twenty-first-century discovery from Indonesia and lived on the island of Flores, apparently until about 18,000 years ago. “You want to make a name for yourself? Learn the language of Indonesia, get a permit, and start digging holes there,” Shea advised.
    As for variations of our even-more-ancient ancestors, the proto-humans Paranthropus and Australopithecus , genera that appeared two to four million years ago in Africa, they had outsized teeth, the better to eat masses of vegetation. “The first thing you’d hear as you approached them is farting,” Shea said. There, now—we won’t ever confuse them with Homo erectus , let alone Homo sapiens .
    It was Shea’s idea that I should sit and take the exam for the Archaeology of Human Origins with the undergraduates. In spite of my crush on Homo heidelbergensis and newfound comfort with various extinct species of humans, I was horrified. I thought that was half the point, the point, of auditing—that I wouldn’t have to write a paper or take a test. “No, it’ll be good for you, it will focus your mind,” Shea said. “Just see how you do.” It must have occurred to him as I eased out of the classroom that my pallor and anxiety might have something to do with my age. “How long has it been since you took a science test?” he asked. Let’s see, tenth-grade biology—forty-two years? He was impressed.
    All the students who signed up for the class but didn’t bother to attend the lectures showed up for the exam. The teaching assistant had to go hunt for extra desks. Shea prefaced the test with a shortlecture that distracted me briefly. He talked about Shanidar Cave in Iraq, excavated in the fifties and sixties by the married archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki, who found Neandertals buried there with evidence of flowers. The startling find, which has never been replicated, quickly worked its way into the popular culture and became the primary inspiration for Jean Auel’s fur-bodice-ripping bestsellers that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear . But Shea wondered, had those Neandertals been deliberately buried with flowers, or had the flowers been introduced by a native burrowing rodent? I am a skeptic; I voted for the rodent.
    Then Shea passed out the exam: mostly multiple choice, about global temperature shifts and the timing of geological epochs and stone weapons and grave goods, and a short essay based on The Humans Who Went Extinct , the book by Clive Finlayson: Why, according to its author, had Neandertals died out? And what was the most important factor in the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens ? I fussed over my answers, circled back, erased, watched as drops of sweat dripped onto my words: Neandertal lived in small groups and had a narrow niche and few strategies when the climate warmed up and their prey changed. Homo sapiens people communicated and traded widely, and were flexible and adaptive. If their cereal crop failed and there were no more reindeer, they’d pack up and head to cousin