The conclusion was firm: Zlatý kůň was roughly 45,000 years old, placing her among the very oldest anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Europe.

This was a woman who had lived at the edge of the earliest known modern human presence on the continent — not just old, but old in a way that placed her at the beginning of the story.

But the 2021 paper revealed something else that was, if anything, even more striking than the date.

Zlatý kůň did not appear to be ancestral to any living population.

When the researchers compared her genome against modern human populations from around the world — African populations, European populations, East Asian populations, South Asian populations, indigenous American populations — they found no clear match.