early southern man

documentary feature

A life upended. A childhood rock collection rediscovered. The history of mankind may never be the same.

After a traumatic brain injury in the operating room, a gifted surgeon is forced to surrender his medical license and with it his sense of identity and life's purpose. In the vacuum created by this accident, he rediscovers a massive cache of local river rocks he collected as a teenager and stashed in his momma's tobacco barn.

Now, decades later, with empty days and an obsessive mind, he spends endless hours in his garage considering the rocks and reading all he can in the academic literature about Paleolithic tools, the origin of homo sapiens, and the human genome in order to prove that these are not merely rocks, but in fact ancient artifacts that could change history.

But the lithic technology at hand does not match anything in recorded science – Is he simply able to see what experts with their professional prejudices cannot, or is his imagination running away from him?