Her people placed her in a cave — in a specific spot, in a specific position, in a specific relationship to others who had been placed there before.

The weight of thousands of years of earth flattened her skull against the cave floor.

Time did the rest.

And then, improbably, a team of researchers came to the cave with micro-CT scanners and sediment analysis and the accumulated knowledge of a century of paleoanthropology, and they lifted her skull fragment by fragment from the matrix in which it had rested for 75 millennia, and they rebuilt it, piece by piece, on a computer screen, and a forensic artist used that reconstruction to give her a face.

That face, when it was unveiled, prompted newspaper headlines and museum exhibitions and genuine public wonder.