The Reburial And What It Meant

When the Spirit Cave Man was finally buried — when the Tribe’s Storyteller was returned to the earth in a private ceremony that Eske Willerslev attended as a guest and a witness — something that had been wrong for more than twenty years was set right.

That is a simple way of saying something that is actually complicated.

The wrong was not just the legal dispute that had kept the remains from the Tribe for two decades.

The wrong went back further — back to 1940, when the Wheelers excavated the burial and the remains were taken from the cave where they had rested for more than ten thousand years.