The Stone That Covered And The Stone That Reveals

In many ways, the MA-1 story is a story about what stones do.

The stone slab placed over the child’s grave 24,000 years ago did what the people who placed it intended it to do: it covered the burial.

It may have been meant as a marker, a seal, a protection.

It did, in a mechanical sense, help to preserve the burial from the disturbance that would have been caused by surface erosion, animal activity, and the various geological processes that move and destroy material in surface or near-surface contexts.

The stone helped the grave survive.