The Figurines In A New Light

After the publication of the Mal’ta genome in 2013, the figurines and grave goods from the site took on an additional resonance.

They were already extraordinary archaeological objects — evidence of artistic and symbolic life among Ice Age Siberian hunters that challenged simplistic narratives about prehistoric human capacity.

But they were now also objects connected, through the genome of the child buried with them, to the ancestral story of the Americas.

The female figurines of Mal’ta have been compared to the Venus figurines of Upper Paleolithic Europe — similar objects made by different people, in different parts of the world, at roughly the same period in human prehistory.