It passes through the sex-determination controversies of the late twentieth century, through the geological fieldwork that confirmed the terminal Pleistocene context, and through the broader intellectual transformation that replaced Clovis First with a more complex understanding of American origins.

The bones contributed to all of this.

Two femoral fragments, 37 feet below a canyon floor, held a date of 13,000 years and a geographic fact of open water, and those two things combined to change what was known about the end of the Ice Age in America.

The person at the center of the story — the individual who died near Arlington Springs 13,000 years ago, whose remains were incorporated into the alluvial sediment of the canyon, who had crossed the Santa Barbara Channel to reach this island — remains, in the most human sense, unknown.

The name is lost.