A person was here.

A person made this.

A person used it.

The bone inside the bone is the evidence.

The Scale Of What Was Lost

There is a specific kind of melancholy in the Manis evidence — not the sentimental kind, but the precise kind that comes from understanding exactly how much of the past is irretrievably gone, and how extraordinary it is when anything survives.

In the thirteen thousand nine hundred years between the Manis hunting event and the present, an incomprehensible amount of human life has occurred in the Pacific Northwest.