The comparison is both illuminating and humbling: it suggests that the tradition of making female figurines in Upper Paleolithic Europe was not a uniquely European phenomenon, but part of a broader pattern of human symbolic behavior that extended across vast geographic distances.

If the Ancient North Eurasian population to which the Mal’ta people belonged was itself genetically connected to some of the populations that contributed to the ancestry of modern Europeans — as the genomic data suggests — then the shared figurine-making tradition may reflect shared cultural ancestry rather than independent invention.

Or it may not.

The connections between cultural traditions and genetic ancestry are not simple or direct.

People can share cultural practices without sharing close genetic ancestry; they can share genetic ancestry without sharing cultural practices.