The Mal’ta boy, in death, became a source of perpetual questions — a genome that has been generating scientific inquiry for more than a decade and will continue to do so as methods improve and new ancient individuals provide additional comparison points.

This is, in its own way, a remarkable kind of legacy.

A child who died at three or four years old, in the middle of the Last Glacial Maximum, in a place so remote by modern standards that it required decades of Soviet-era archaeological expeditions to excavate — this child has become, through the accident of genomic preservation and the development of ancient DNA science, one of the most influential individuals in the history of research on human prehistory.

He did not choose this role.