The genetic evidence established that connection with scientific precision, but the connection itself is human rather than scientific.

The Anzick burial is a reminder that the deep human past is not a foreign country.

It is home.

The people who lived 13,000 years ago were people — fully human, fully capable, fully embedded in social relationships and cultural practices and emotional experiences that are recognizable across the vast distance of time.

The mother or father or community member who placed that child in the Montana sandstone with those extraordinary tools was doing something that every human being who has ever lost someone would recognize: trying, through whatever means were available, to do right by the person they had lost.

The tools are extraordinary.