We can know the date.

We can know the technology.

We can know the genetics.

We cannot know the child.

But the fact that we cannot fully know the child does not make the child less real, or less human, or less deserving of the attention and respect that the living people who came to that reburial ceremony in 2014 were expressing.

The limits of scientific knowledge are not the limits of human connection across time.

The child was real.

The love that created that burial was real.

And the living people who count themselves as descendants — who attended the ceremony, who participated in the research, who continue to maintain their cultures and their connections to this ancient history — are as real as anything that 13,000 years of human continuity can produce.

— COMPLETE FINAL END —