What they did not have was the specific accumulated technological capital of ten thousand years of civilization — the wheel, the kiln, the written word, the domesticated plant and animal.

These technologies, which emerged during the Neolithic transition beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, were world-changing.

But their absence did not make the people who came before them less intelligent or less human.

The people of Mal’ta were fully modern human beings.

They laughed and grieved and planned and argued and loved and remembered.

They had knowledge of their landscape that would shame most modern people — they understood the behavior of animals they hunted, the seasonal patterns of their environment, the properties of the materials they worked, with an intimacy born of total dependence.

They had traditions of making and meaning — the figurines, the ornaments, the specific forms of burial practice that the child’s grave demonstrates — that had been developed over generations and transmitted with the kind of care that significant cultural knowledge always demands.