Each layer is important.

And each layer adds meaning to the others: the burial is more significant because of what the genome revealed; the genome is more moving because of the burial from which it was extracted; the Ice Age world is more vivid because of the specific community that inhabited it.

This is how the best histories work — by finding a specific, concrete human story that opens onto larger and larger implications, each layer adding depth to the ones below it.

The Mal’ta boy is a very good history, in this sense.