The people who made these figurines also buried a child with more than 120 ornaments and a diadem of mammoth ivory.

They were the same people.

Why 24,000 Years Changes Everything

When we say that a burial is 24,000 years old, we are saying something so large that it resists being felt.

Let’s try to feel it anyway.

Twenty-four thousand years ago, the first civilizations — the cities and writing systems and organized states that define the historical period — were more than eighteen thousand years in the future.

Egypt would not exist for another nineteen thousand years.