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Meet Ace-of-Grace - if you can find him. He's old school. Really old.

The self-assured, 5-feet 8-inch, lean, 25-year-old paleo-Indian from 14,000 years ago was among the first Homo sapiens to call the middle Rio Grande Valley home.

Ace is hard to catch, because he's imaginary - sort of. I asked David Stuart to help me gin him up the other day. Stuart is a University of New Mexico anthropology professor and author of several books about New Mexico's earliest inhabitants. He knows and loves this stuff.

Don't blame Stuart if I get carried away here: I contend that Ace is real, accessible to us and sorely needed for his advice. You can find remains of his campsites atop the hills west of town. He's also inside of us - anatomically indistinguishable from contemporary Homo sapiens. Stuart says Ace "wouldn't have stuck out at a recent Gathering of Nations dance."

That's remarkable. Ace, his tribe and other Stone Age peoples around the globe had the same hard-wiring as you and me. But culturally, they were way different. More accurately: We are way different.

Ace & Co. - as intellectually agile as us - lived basically the same way from the emergence of Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago to the rise of agriculture 8,000 years ago. They were very conservative and traditional, making spear points the same way for hundreds of years at a stretch. Their ancestors, from habilis to erectus, did things the same way for millions of years.

What should intrigue us is their astonishing record of success. They survived for thousands of generations, through geological eras of glaciers and thaws. Our civilizations are short-timers by contrast. Even ancient Egypt is in ruins.

What was life like for Ace and friends?

He lived from hand to mouth, hunting and gathering year-round, adjusting to nature. He didn't hoard. His footprint was light - maybe 20 people in his close-knit clan and four or five in his hunting party. His range was huge - about 60 square miles per human.

His shelters were impermanent stick-and-hide affairs that were easily abandoned. He knew in profound detail the habits of his prey, the weather, the natures and locations of plants, rivers, winds, seasons. He was an expert tool-maker and as good at slinging an atlatl as John Wayne was a gun.

Albuquerque "was a paradise," Stuart said - colder, wetter and ripe for the plucking. There were lakes, whose remains are evident. Plant life, including pi?ons and chiles, was similar - just easier to reach, because it grew at lower altitudes. Game ran from wood rats and giant armadillos to aurochs and mastodons.

Ace's culture wasn't as complex as ours, physically, but it was more adaptable. Ace always had a Plan B and could go to it immediately - unlike us, with our energy crises, sinking cities and such.

Don't get me wrong: Our last 8,000 years were a blast. I'll take our scientific and cultural achievements, thank you.

What bugs me is how we act as if the world was made out of whole cloth 8,000 years ago, as if we're at the pinnacle of creation and as if our ancestors were as clueless as Fred Flintstone.

We're full of important old secrets that we've forgotten how to hear. I'd listen to Ace and keep wise Homo sapiens like Stuart close for the next few thousand years.