It is worth taking a moment to trace, in outline, the long journey that the genetic material in the Mal’ta boy’s cells took before it ended up in the scientific literature in 2013.

The journey began roughly 24,000 years ago, at the moment of the child’s conception.

The genome he received from his parents — a combination of their genetic material, produced by the biological process of sexual reproduction — was the genome he would carry for the rest of his short life.

That genome was the product of thousands of generations of ancestry, stretching back through the population histories of the Mal’ta community, through the broader populations of Ice Age Siberia, through the ancient movements of people across Eurasia after their ancestors left Africa tens of thousands of years earlier.

At the moment of the child’s death, the process of genomic preservation — or, more accurately, of genomic degradation — began.