The Crazy Mountains to the north and the Absaroka Range to the south would have been recognizable as mountains — geological features on that scale persist — but everything at and below the treeline has changed.

The ecology of western Montana in the early Holocene was a transition zone between late Pleistocene and modern conditions, with plant communities that do not exactly match anything on the modern landscape.

Into that transitional landscape, the people of the child’s community were moving — not as pioneers seeing the landscape for the first time, but as people who had already been in the Americas for some period and who were adapting their subsistence strategies and their movements to the rapidly changing conditions of the early Holocene.

The large game animals that had been a central part of the diet and economy of Ice Age hunters were becoming scarcer.