It was carried by people who were grieving, who were doing the work of grief in the specific way that their culture had developed for doing it: gathering materials, making objects, arranging a burial, sealing it with something permanent.

The stone has been moved now.

The burial has been excavated, documented, and analyzed.

The child’s bones are in a museum.

The beads and ornaments and bird carvings are studied and published and known.

The genome has been sequenced and compared against databases of modern and ancient human populations, and from that comparison a major revision of our understanding of Native American ancestry has been derived.

The child himself — the specific person, the three-year-old or four-year-old who grew up in a mammoth-bone shelter near Lake Baikal and learned the sounds and smells of the Pleistocene steppe before he died — is not recoverable in any fuller sense than what the bones and the grave goods tell us.