One of the aspects of the Anzick burial that is easiest to overlook but that deserves careful attention is the duration of its undisturbed preservation.

The child was buried approximately 13,000 years ago.

The burial was disturbed in 1968.

Between those two events — between the last people who knew of the burial’s existence and the construction workers who inadvertently reopened it — there was a silence of 13 millennia.

During that silence, enormous transformations occurred.

The Pleistocene ended.

The great ice sheets melted.

The mammoth and the horse and the giant ground sloth went extinct.