Why do we care about the ancient world?

   Clearly, we do. King Tut in Philadelphia is a huge deal. So is the news from Stonehenge, where anthropologists have discovered a great Neolithic settlement in the Wiltshire plains of England.

   With room for hundreds of people, this village of wood and stone seems to have served as a seasonal feasting place. A nice carpet of smashed pottery and gnawed-on cow bones littered the floor. Par-tay! Researchers have roughed out eight complete houses and say there might have been hundreds, complete with box beds, cupboards and hearths.

   How old is this ancient town? One guess: It dates to 2600-2500 B.C., more or less coeval with nearby Stonehenge, the still-mysterious stone circle, built and rebuilt again and again, which may date to 3100 B.C. Perhaps this town was a loading dock and ceremonial way station for the henge itself.

   The people who built town and henge did not have writing; the oldest writing known was then in use, but thousands of miles southeast in what is now Iraq. So we have to guess what they were up to. This prehistoric party-house is right by the river Avon. Remains of the dead, or other ceremonial gear, could have been boated just a short way upriver to Stonehenge.

   And by the way, this is way older than Tut. Tut's old, all right, but when he was born (around 1334 B.C.), some kind of Stonehenge had been around for about 1,800 years already. Already, back in the foggy, cold, past (the Stonehengers were not Druids, and no one knows what they were; all we have are guesses), a vital, close-knit culture thrived, with energy enough to sink millions of person-hours into quarrying and hauling stone (without the wheel!) many miles; very wise about sun, stars and seasons; already, on their own terms, architects without pi, priests without churches, cosmologists without telescopes.

   Fascinating, but so what? Won't cure cancer, end war, or colonize the solar system. What good is it?

   You decide. Maybe such discoveries are but curiosities, info-scraps for Trivial Pursuit. Maybe they're just fuel for daydreams, when people wonder to themselves: How'd all this get to be here? What's the story that led me to the world I know?

   Or maybe more. Despite our exquisite, exuberant technologies, ours is not a species that's always good at knowing itself. Sometimes, the only way to understand why we do things is to step back and ponder why they did things. And in the Stonehenge people, as in Tut, we recognize an aching quest for connection, for a home amid a great circle of people, stars and time.

   Sometimes, as with Stonehenge, we're faced with a riddle.

   At others, we know the answer. Last Monday, at a construction site near Mantua, Italy, workers discovered two skeletons, a young man's and woman's, in an embrace that has lasted 5,000 to 6,000 years, eloquent beyond writing. "I've never been so moved," said one scientist. Why it moved her, why our ancient traces move a people of space stations, plasma TVs and iPods, well, that's no mystery.