They buried their dead with care.

They built the kinds of social relationships and cultural practices that make human communities possible.

They were, in every meaningful sense, fully human — not primitive precursors to “real” civilization but people whose cognitive and social capacities were identical to those of any human alive today.

The scientific debates about Population Y and ancient migration routes are conducted using the biological traces those people left behind — their DNA, their bones, their teeth.

The debates can sometimes make it easy to lose sight of the people themselves, to treat the ancient individuals as data points rather than as human beings with their own histories and their own descendants.