But underneath all of those things, it is a simpler story.

A man died in the Great Basin of Nevada approximately 10,600 years ago.

The people who had known him and loved him wrapped him carefully in the materials that their world provided — rabbit skins, tule mats, handmade moccasins — and placed him in a cave in the hillside.

They left him there.

For more than ten thousand years, the cave kept him.

The lake that had fed his community shrank and eventually disappeared.