In virtually every human culture that has left a record of its beliefs, birds carry significance: they cross the boundary between earth and sky, they appear and disappear with the seasons, they speak in voices that are not human voices.

Whether the birds at Mal’ta meant something similar, or something entirely different, or something we cannot reconstruct at all — they were not random.

They were chosen.

The choice to place bird carvings in a child’s grave is a statement about belief.

About what the living thought would be useful, or meaningful, or comforting to the dead.

About the existence of a cosmology — an organized understanding of the world and what lies beyond it — that motivated specific actions in the face of loss.

In the entire sweep of human experience, there may be nothing more distinctively human than giving grave goods to a child.