“...And so we can surmise,” Professor Ashryn summed up his lecture as always. “That Man evolved from the Nantals of the North-Eastern Jungles. Are there any questions?”
The classroom remained silent for several moments, until a hand raised tentatively to the air.
“Yes, Mr. Andrews.” The professor gestured at Jona Andrews, who sat diffidently in the third row of the class; not too close to be considered a brown-nose, not too far to be considered a slacker. Jona took a moment to run his fingers through his straight yet unkempt dark blond hair.
“My grandfather says that Man comes from Soltera, Professor.” His voice lacked the confidence of the statement, and Ashryn pounced upon it, ready to tear apart the theory with his dogmatic adherence to the text of “men of science and honor.”
“Ah, yes.” Ashryn chuckled with rueful delight. “Dr. Andrews’ theory based upon the old myths of 'The Three Brother Ships.' He paused to push his optic aides further up the bridge of his nose.

First, I thought the introduction was interesting. It was certainly an info dump, but you did well to play the classic smug professor demolishing the naive-yet-probably-correct student scenario. I felt like the scene could have been made more interesting if it were told from someone's perspective--like the student, Jona (I personally dislike fiction names that are takes on real names differing by only a letter or two--"Jonah" has a better look and feel. But that's completely subjective and in my opinion).

These 13 lines have three persistent traits that could be changed for the betterment of the story. First, too many adverbs and adjectives. Adverbs can be used, but they are not your friend. Decription is good when it advances the plot or illuminates the theme, it isn't good in and of itself. This opening is choked with it, and it makes it difficult to get through. Even though all of these details are things you saw in your mind's eye when you wrote the story, they don't have to be reported to the reader. In general, less is more regarding descriptive modifiers.

Second, you engage in a persistent use of the passive voice. Constructions like "a hand raised" should be illegal. Passive voice is rarely neccesary, and changing a sentence from a passive construction to subject-active verb usually improves it.

Third, the passage uses much unneccessary verbiage. "summed up his lecture as always," is more eloquent as "concluded," "took a moment to run his fingers" as "ran his fingers," "paused to push" as "pushed." I'd be willing to bet that you'd like your product better if you hunted verbal excess like this and eliminated it root and branch.

Fourth, you call glasses "optic aids" in what I assume is an attempt to make the milieu more exotic. Your professor's lecture makes it clear that the milieu is already identifiably different. There's no need to invent names for common things to make it more so--I and least some other readers find the attempt distracting. Call a rabbit a rabbit, as the saying goes.

You say the finished product is ~12,000? I'd be willing to take a peek.

There are a lot of place-holder words, like "optic aids", because I have yet to name them. The 14th line was:

They were an item not unlike conventional reading glasses in look, but worked upon a different science than typical eye glasses.

Anyhow, there are places where I break the story and tell myself what *should* happen next, as well as times when I outright tell myself to rewrite a section. As it stands, I've hacked and slashed at this poor story for the better part of three years, and as such it has several different writing styles and is a mess in general.