But his careful documentation of the burial context — the position of the body, the arrangement of the grave goods, the relationship between the objects and the human remains — was the foundation on which all subsequent research was built.

The Mal’ta boy’s story, in its scientific dimensions, begins with Gerasimov’s shovel in the Siberian earth of the late 1920s.

The Ongoing Science

The 2013 publication of the Mal’ta genome was not the end of the story.

It was, in many ways, the beginning of a new phase of research — a phase in which the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry signal, newly identified and clearly characterized, became a central variable in the study of Eurasian and American population histories.

Subsequent research has used the Mal’ta genome as a reference point for analyzing the ancestry of ancient and modern populations from across a vast geographic range.