The 24,000-Year-Old Boy Buried Beneath A Stone Slab With 120 Beads And Mammoth-Ivory Jewelry — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Hidden Source Of Native American Ancestry
It is a burial that reflects deliberate planning, access to significant material resources, and some kind of communal intention to mark the death of this specific individual as significant.
The child was laid on his back.
Estimates of his age at death place him somewhere between three and four years old — not a newborn infant, but not yet a child who had experienced much of the world his community inhabited.
Old enough to have been a specific person with a recognized face and personality within his group.
Young enough that his death would have been devastating by any emotional standard, in any period of human history.
The burial was covered by a flat stone slab that had been deliberately placed over the grave.