ABSTRACT
In 1998, the Ancient One was two years unearthed and I was a junior archaeology student at the University of Idaho. A color transparency of a USA Today newspaper clipping depicting the Ancient One's facial reconstruction was slapped on the overhead in my Human Evolution class. Somebody shrieked, “Captain Picard!” and nervous laughter erupted from the class. USA Today, the most pop of American daily newspapers, sandwiched the cast of the Ancient One between advertisements, headlines, and celebrities, as if he was a prehistoric spokesman for a line of sneakers, a discount airline, or a science superhero: K-Man! He bumrushed the scene as the doppelganger of Corpus Delicti, a commodity and a cyborg, a corporate merger of sci-fi and bones.
