A group of people, somewhere near Lake Baikal, 24,000 years ago.

They have just lost a child — a small child, barely three or four years old, whose life had barely begun.

They are doing what the people of this community do when someone dies.

They are doing it with care, and with the resources their world provides.

Someone is sewing beads onto clothing.

The beads are small — drilled through with patience and skill, strung and attached with the kind of careful work that the cold and the grief cannot stop.

Someone else is gathering the ivory pieces — the carved birds, the pendants, the diadem that will go on the child’s head.