It might have been around the time of my first prom date — that would have been in the mid-’50s — when we’d been studying early man: Piltdown, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon. We students at Immaculate Conception School became fascinated by the terms, presented with drawings of what our ancestors might have looked like.

Accordingly, anyone who failed to render a quick and correct answer when called on by Sister Mucha Misa was labelled a Neanderthal, the same way we’d brand our classmates as creeps or nerds, or even Communists.

It was then that for no reason I could discern, my prom date called me a Neanderthal. I still wonder whether that appellation came because I was aggressive as I dropped her off on her front porch — or not aggressive enough.

Remember, in the innocent ‘50s, there wasn’t much to do in Las Vegas but go to one of three movie theaters, four if you count the drive-in. Or we could swallow a late-night burger and fries at the Home Cafe or the Silver Spur, the only 24-hour restaurants in town.

As I was leaving my date’s front porch, I recalled the Neanderthal christening and said, “You’re wrrronng. I just got a promotion — to Cro-Magnon.”

But having said that, I wasn’t sure which early creature represented a promotion. Was it a demotion instead? Around that time, there had been rumblings about the “discovery” of the Piltdown Man, in southern England. Some saw it as a hoax. Reputable anthropologists suspected a forgery, a clever melding of ape and human skull pieces and even some teeth obviously tampered with by files and chisels.

Coincidentally, I saw Bob Mishler recently. He’s a retired anthropologist from Highlands who would have explained whether my date had insulted or praised me. But maybe my not knowing is better.

On that note, let me report that 3 percent of me is Neanderthal. There’s a mixture of Mediterranean, Northern European, Southwest Asian, Sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian.

Slightly more than a third of me, 36 percent, is Mediterranean, and the next-biggest share is something I’ve suspected all along: one-quarter Native American. There’s only a smidgen of Sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian, 2 percent.

I find the Neanderthal percentage fascinating. Neanderthals are our closest extinct human relative. They (we) are characterized by “skulls that include the large middle part of the face, angled cheek bones, and a huge nose for humidifying and warming cold, dry air,” according to National Geographic.

The Neanderthal bodies were shorter and stockier than ours, another adaptation to living in cold environments. And their brains were often larger than ours, proportional to brawnier bodies.

And on that bit of information, we can draw a couple of conclusions: First, my prom date was only 3 percent right, and I’m also one-quarter Native American.

So what is all that jazz about being “100 percent pure” anything? Unless one grew up in a land where there was no cross-fertilization, the chances of being “pure” certainly are almost nil. In the ‘60s, then I taught school in Cuba, on the edge of the Navajo Reservation, some students often referred to themselves as “FBI — Full-Blooded Indian.”

But does anybody believe there ever was a breed of beings with absolutely pure ancestry? Not likely.

I received the news about my ancestry in February after joining the National Geographic Genographic Project to map the human journey. Its scientists ran a cutting-edge test of my DNA and came up with the above conclusions.

It’s amazing what we can find out by the mere swabbing of our inner cheek, carefully packaging the Q-Tip, enclosing a check, mailing it and waiting for the results.

At the time, I was one of 705,343 participants. The results explain that my “maternal lineage began about 150,000 years ago.” It says, “After leaving Africa, my maternal ancestors traveled inland across Asia. While many of my cousins settled there, my ancestors continued on. They crossed a temporary land bridge that connected Asia and present-day Alaska during the last ice age, settling in the Americas.”

Our distant cousins are part of the pre-Columbian population in both North and South America.

My paternal lineage began about 180,000 years ago. My dad’s ancient dads carried farming from the Fertile Crescent into Europe. According to the conclusions, “This revolution did not only change the way food was grown but introduced a shift from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled one.”

Due to the efforts of my long-gone paternal forebears, “Changes to tools, pottery and weapons may not otherwise have been possible.”

The National Geographic results include a world map that resembles one of those maps that contains only U.S. Interstates. Apparently, we all originated in a site in east-central Africa.
The results add that the Native American component of my ancestry is “found at the highest frequency in the populations of the Americas. It represents the signal of the original settlers of North and South America who arrived via the Bering land bridge between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.”

And it adds that the only other place where Native American ancestry “is found at frequencies of 2 to 3 percent is in Siberia and Mongolia.” It concludes that these two locations are the likely place of origin of the Native American.

My wife did the Q-Tip regimen when I did and we discovered that Bonnie’s ancestors, after having left Africa, made their way to northern India, the Mediterranean and Northern Europe before arriving in North America.

That makes our three sons complex individuals. Our oldest, Stanley Adam, found himself a Danish bride, and their two daughters assuredly represent a melange of Scandinavian ethnicities and DNA markers.

How many cheek swabs will be needed to flesh out our grand-daughters’ heritage?
Stay tuned.