This layer expands the story from a single burial to a world — the world that the child inhabited, the world that produced him and the objects that accompanied him.

At the next layer, it is the story of the Ice Age itself — the Last Glacial Maximum, the megafauna, the cold and the darkness and the extraordinary human achievement of surviving in conditions that would defeat most modern people within days.

And at the deepest layer, it is the story of ancestry — of the genetic connections between a 24,000-year-old child in Siberia and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, connections that were invisible for most of human history and that were only revealed when the technology to read ancient DNA was finally developed.

Each layer is real.