She had dark skin under an ice-age sky that no modern Central European landscape resembles.

She belonged to a population among the very first modern humans to set foot in what would eventually become the Czech Republic — people who had walked or been born into a landscape that their predecessors had never seen, that would take decades or centuries to become familiar.

She carried, in her cells, the genetic legacy of a human-Neanderthal interbreeding event that had happened in the generations before her — a record of contact between two human species at the moment of one’s replacement by the other.

She died, at some point, and her bones ended up in a limestone cave.