The burial of the infants within a former cooking hearth added another dimension to this picture.

The choice of that location — a place that had been central to the life and warmth of the camp — for the burial of the community’s youngest members speaks to relationships between the living and the dead that we can recognize as human even if we cannot know the specific cultural logic that motivated the choice.

All of this made Upward Sun River a site of considerable archaeological significance before anyone had sequenced a single base pair of ancient DNA from it.

The DNA would not change the archaeological findings.