The controversial aspects of my story come together at the end.
There's some, albeit quite small, archaeological evidence of early modern human living structures made as I've described. That's unsurprising, since those structures naturally would have vanished over time. But the idea of humans living mainly in caves simply doesn't stand up to sense. Among other things a well-ventilated cave (to vent the smoke from heating and cooking fires) is pretty hard to find. As for Hugo's people cultivating crops, that, too, makes sense for the reasons I give. It's also hard to imagine agricultural settlements suddenly arising when they did-at the beginnings of historic times-without some precursor. I'm not talking about extensive planting, of course, more on the order of what today would be called kitchen gardens, but it makes sense that tribal/clan groupings in enough numbers to support the hunts that we have evidence took place would require greater sources of supplemental plant food than could be accommodated by random gathering activities unaided by cultivation of the soil.
The wheel? I think relatively modern American Indian history should speak to this point rather fully. Absent a technological base the travois is a lot more efficient means of transporting goods than a wheeled cart of some sort.
OK, I've slanted my story a bit toward the pacifistic. (The quote, by the way, is from a poem called "Out There" by Wilfred Owens, who died as a footsoldier during World War I, some of whose verses were set to music by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem.) It's more probable that the development of tribalism in the time of Hugo's former life would have fomented much greater intra-human conflict than he discusses. Unfortunately the tendence of humans to act inhumanely toward other humans appears to have its roots in our beginnings. Still, it's possible that at least some segments of the population retained enough sense not to fight unnecessarily with their peers, and I choose to focus on that. The nastiness that modern people inflict on those around them by dint of petty differences in skin color, facial features, religious choices, linguistic distinctions, gender, sexual preferences and so on-just about any kind of difference at all, it seems-has never struck me as either rational nor productive. I prefer to view early humans as less intent on compelling those around them to conform to some arbitrarily selected "norm" of behavior and appearance or face physical duress or annihilation.
Besides, as the last chapter mentions, there were quite enough natural threats that made life much shorter for our ancestors than we enjoy. Humans didn't need to find trivial excuses to kill each other then; at least the humans of my imagining didn't. They were at least as smart as we and under vastly less population pressure to require thinning of the herd through organized warfare and unorganized mayhem.
Finally, I'm aware that I'm being pretty cruel to formal education and those who make it a profession. I don't mean to be entirely negative about the process, but I've always found our modern institutions of learning to often be aimed as much at stultifying those who come for knowledge as truly helping them. I actually handled the last two years of my college education about the way Hugo says; if going to class was unneeded (not infrequently), I didn't. I was taking a full load of classes as well as working a 40-hours-a-week schedule, which put more demands on my time than I could tell the school; they had rules that you couldn't work full time while you took a full load of classes. But I managed to simply not tell them, which avoided problems. In any case, I've always preferred to learn on my own than to be "guided" by teachers who want more to shape my thinking than to impart information.