A well-documented association between the skull and cultural material would have provided information about the technological tradition Zlatý kůň’s people used and potentially about how she died or was treated after death.

The absence of good contextual archaeology is one reason the dating of the specimen depended so heavily on genomic methods rather than on typological association with known cultural traditions.

The genome provided the dating; the archaeology could not.

After Zlatý Kůň: The Next 45,000 Years

It is worth, in closing, trying to hold in mind the magnitude of the time that has elapsed since Zlatý kůň lived — and what has happened in that time.

In the roughly 45,000 years since this woman’s death, the following things happened, in sequence: The Neanderthals became extinct, approximately 5,000 years after she lived.