It is still real.

The boy beneath the stone helped put it there.

The Tools That Made The Tiara

It is worth spending time with the physical process of making the objects found in MA-1’s burial, because the process itself is evidence of a specific kind of human capacity.

The mammoth-ivory tiara fragment recovered from the burial was not a simple object.

Mammoth tusks are composed of ivory with a specific internal structure: an outer cementum layer covering dentin with a characteristic cross-hatching pattern visible in cross-section, known as the Schreger pattern.

This structure makes mammoth ivory harder to work in some ways than the ivory of modern elephants, though the basic challenges — removing material, shaping the form, achieving a smooth surface — are the same regardless of the specific source.