They were sophisticated hunters who understood their prey’s behavior, territory, and seasonal movements with the intimacy that comes from a lifetime of observation and from cultural knowledge accumulated over generations.

They knew where mammoths went in winter.

They knew where they drank in summer.

They knew which landscape features could be used to channel animals toward a killing zone.

They worked in coordinated groups, communicating and planning in language — a language we will never hear, spoken in dialects we will never reconstruct.

Around the mammoth, and around the other large animals of the Pleistocene steppe — the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the spotted hyena, the horses and reindeer and bison — an entire culture had organized itself.

The art of Mal’ta, the objects found in the burials, the physical layout of the site’s living structures: all of it reflects a community that was deeply embedded in the ecology of the Pleistocene steppe, that had built its material and symbolic life around the animals it hunted and the landscape it moved through.