They were not choosing a random location.

They were choosing a place that made ecological sense — elevated, dry, with access to the rich resources of the lake margin below.

That choice — made more than ten thousand years ago by people who understood their landscape with intimate precision — is still visible in the landscape today.

The cave is still there.

The hillside is still there.

The ancient lake is gone, but its terraces and its playas and its tufa formations remain as evidence of the world that the Spirit Cave Man inhabited.

The continuity of the landscape — even in its transformed state — is part of what connects the ancient past to the living present.