But who exactly they were — what they called themselves, how they understood their world, what ceremonies they performed, what stories they told — is irretrievably lost.

This is where the Manis evidence requires a particular kind of intellectual humility.

The rib and the point and the reconstruction do not give us a person.

They give us a moment: a brief, violent moment in an ancient landscape, documented by the accident of a weapon tip striking bone rather than passing through soft tissue that would have been gone within years.

The people behind that moment deserve to be acknowledged as real, skilled, and fully human — not as generic primitive hunters, not as ancestors of any specific named group, but as people in their own right whose lives, knowledge, and communities were as real as our own, even if the details of those lives are beyond our current capacity to recover.