What they felt, walking away from that hillside, is not in the record.

The grief of parents burying a very young child is one of the oldest and deepest forms of human suffering, and it has not changed in twelve thousand years.

Whatever the specific cosmological framework that shaped how they understood that grief, the grief itself was real and it was human and it was, in that moment on that Montana hillside in the early Holocene, as present and as devastating as any grief has ever been.

The genome did not recover that grief.