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The Question Of What Was Believed

There is one dimension of the Mal’ta burial that remains, by definition, beyond the reach of any scientific analysis: what the people who conducted it believed.

We can document the objects.

We can analyze the arrangement.

We can measure the labor investment and infer the social significance.

We can extract the genome and compare it against the genomes of modern populations.

What we cannot do is enter the minds of the people who stood at that grave and understand what they thought was happening.