His remains, in the museum collections of Russia, are a physical resource that future researchers may be able to analyze with methods that do not yet exist — methods that might extract additional genomic information, or provide new forms of isotopic or proteomic data, that would add further dimensions to what is known about this child and his community.

The stone has been moved.

The burial has been excavated.

The genome has been read.

But the reading is not finished.

It may never be finished.

That is, in the end, the nature of the deep past: always partially obscured, always yielding a little more information as methods improve, always holding some secrets that the available evidence cannot reach.

The child beneath the stone is the same child he has always been.