What I await is the isotope testing that reveals just where these men grew up, and what we can learn from that. My guess is that there’s going to be a lot of surprises, just as with Otzi.

I don’t think we even know what we don’t know. The evidence of things like Gobekli Tepe, which throws everything we thought we knew about the era it was built during out on their ears, tends to make me think that there are a lot of things lurking out there for us to trip over, some of which we likely are already aware of and don’t recognize. I would speculate that our ancestors were a hell of a lot more sophisticated and much more “civilized” than we credit them. After all, how the hell did they accomplish things like all the dolmens, henges, and other lithic structures without large, sophisticated societies? Look at the scale of the things, for the love of God: They’re all over the damn place, in Europe, and that’s just what was in stone. How much more was wood, and now lost to the ages? What is lurking out there on the continental shelf, from when the ocean levels were far below what they are now, during the last Ice Age? Hell, for that matter, what the hell got ground under the damn ice sheets?

You tell me our ancestors were primitive and unsophisticated, and I’m going to point at you and laugh: The little evidence we have points to us being a bunch of credulous dolts, when it comes to a lot of this stuff. I would not be a bit surprised to find extensive signs of settlement and large populations, were someone to go out looking at the likely spots along the coastlines where the river deltas would have been, back before the ice melted. Likewise, what’s waiting for us to notice, with regards to things out in the Dogger Banks? Or, the Indian Ocean?