Free Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson

Joe’s.
    After the class, with dangerous levels of adrenaline coursing through my veins, I had a delayed realization on the drive home and banged the steering wheel in frustration. Damn it! Chance! I forgot chance! Chance and luck—huge factors in evolutionary survival.
    In New York City the next day, heading down the subway stairs, I began to feel a tightness in my chest. I slowed down and let the others of my species flow around me, variable and complex. If I collapsed in a subway car, they would find my notebook, full of the advice and maxims of Shea, who once called himself “Beardo theWeirdo”: “never camp by the edge of a waterhole”; “don’t screw with hippos”; “baboons are like German shepherds on crack”; and “any of you had seal? very good”—and what would the forensics team make of these? Such a shame to die before the goat roast. Maybe skeletal remains and the explicit consideration of extinction were getting to me. When the tightness persisted and began to feel painful, I took myself to the emergency room. Pinned to an IV line, an EKG machine rolling up to capture my flutters and skips, I considered the nurse’s routine question: Had I been under stress?
    I looked into her kind, concerned eyes. I had just taken a science test for the first time in decades, I told her. Could that send me into cardiac arrest?
    I was not in cardiac arrest, but, just to be safe, I spent the weekend in the hospital, where I read the assignments in The Human Career , our thousand-plus-page textbook, and submitted to more tests, including one where, surrounded by emergency personnel, I walked faster and faster on a treadmill. My heart did not fail.
    Shea e-mailed the results of my archaeology test, which I also did not fail. “32/33,” he wrote. “Not bad.” Not bad? Are you kidding? All but one answer right? I felt the weight lift from my chest. Not mentioning chance as a factor in extinction hadn’t hurt me, but I did miss a question about the Natufians, a Homo sapiens culture * from 10,000 years ago. The lovely Natufians flourished for several thousand years in what is now the Middle East. They domesticated dogs and used mortars and pestles and spent hours makingpolished bone beads. I pictured them: good cooks, laid-back folk, artsy-craftsy. If I had to go back in time, I’d be a Natufian, me and my dog, Homer. We’d eat gazelle. Even now I can hear Shea’s voice: “Gazelle—the Big Mac of the Natufians.”
    â€œ THE NAKED CHILD ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river.” My heart beat faster hearing the first sentence of The Clan of the Cave Bear , the audiobook that kept me company on the long drives to and from Stony Brook. Jean Auel’s novel, set about 25,000 years ago, tells the story of a lost Homo sapiens girl adopted and raised by Neandertals. A monster bestseller in 1980, it was followed by five sequels, the last just published in 2011. The series, called Earth’s Children, * combines adventure and romance with a manual on survival in the Ice Age. Auel’s biggest achievement was to replace the image of a brutish caveman with a beautiful, intelligent, resourceful cave woman. In Ayla, Auel created the most famous figure of the Upper Paleolithic, after, that is, the Venus of Willendorf. Auel was enabled in this by archaeologists, who furnished the groundwork for the ingenious, detailed, and complex societies that she worked out in her books.
    Originally, Auel said she imagined “a story about a young woman who was living with people who were significantly different, but they let her stay because she was taking care of an old man with a crippled arm.” She wanted to set the story in the distant past, but knew nothing about it. “What kind of character is a caveman?” she wondered. In her research, she came across the books of Ralph Solecki,