The man who was buried near its shores has been returned to the earth.

The community that descends from the early inhabitants of that landscape is still here.

And the deep human history of the Great Basin continues — in the present tense, not just as a scientific narrative but as the lived reality of communities that have been here for longer than Western civilization has existed, and that intend to be here long after the scientific debates of the twenty-first century have been settled.

The Spirit Cave Man was buried 10,600 years ago by people who cared about him.