This Is Where You Put Grandma

The paleoanthropologist
Explains the neat row of skeletons
Of Neanderthals in Shanidar,

Placed inside the cave before the last
Glacial maximum of the Ice Age,
Before remaining humanity

Became monophyletic, before
The earliest for-sure cave symbols
That anyone has discovered yet—

A long time ago, in other words.
You could fit the whole of history
Nine or ten times over in the gap

Between those Shanidar skeletons
And the earliest writing systems.
A reconstruction is in the news,

A clay sculpture portraying Grandma
As a wise, pensive-looking woman,
Wrinkled forehead over massive brows.

Did she look like this? She might have done.
What you do know is that she did live,
Her teeth worn down almost to gums,

Lived and then died, a human being
In a place human beings still live,
So she must have woken up each day

Concerned—how verbally, you can’t say—
With individual needs and wants
That probably wouldn’t surprise you,

As did everyone else alive then
And as did everyone who lived
In the interim, generations

Of individuals like islands
In extended archipelagos,
So you know your wants belong with them.