The Bering land bridge existed, connecting Siberia to Alaska across the exposed continental shelf, but the people who would eventually use it to cross into the Western Hemisphere had not yet done so, or had only recently begun.

In a profound sense, the Americas were waiting.

The vast landscapes of North and South America — the forests, the plains, the mountains, the river valleys, the coasts — were occupied by animals that had never encountered human hunters.

The megafauna of the Americas — the mammoths and mastodons, the giant ground sloths, the horses and camels, the giant short-faced bears — were living in a world without the pressure of human predation, a world that was about to change entirely with the arrival of people from the other side of the world.

The descendants of the population to which the Mal’ta boy belonged were among the people who would eventually cross into that world and begin the process of populating the Americas.