The Bering land bridge is covered by rising seas.

The Americas are peopled, diversified, and filled with thousands of years of separate human history.

Civilizations rise and fall.

Languages proliferate and branch and evolve.

The modern world takes shape, with all its complexity and noise.

And beneath it all, beneath the immensity of everything that has happened in 24,000 years, a genome persists — cold, fragmented, waiting — in the bones of a child who was buried with 120 beads and a crown of mammoth ivory.

Waiting for the moment when the science could finally read what the burial had preserved.