The Mal’ta child’s burial, while less numerically overwhelming than Sungir, shares the essential character of elaborate investment in the burial of a young child.

Both burials suggest communities that had developed complex understandings of social status, identity, and the significance of death — communities that were willing to invest substantial material resources in the burials of individuals who had not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate any conventional form of adult achievement.

Together, Sungir and Mal’ta suggest that the elaborate treatment of children’s burials in the Upper Paleolithic was not an isolated phenomenon.

It was part of a broader cultural pattern, distributed across a large geographic area and a substantial time period, in which the communities of the Paleolithic world recognized and expressed the social importance of their young members even in death.