We do not know whether the people who buried him had any sense that the genetic material in his cells would be read 24,000 years later by people using technologies that would have been incomprehensible to them.

These are not failures of the science.

They are the genuine limits of what physical evidence and genomic analysis can recover from the deep past.

The bones and the genome and the grave goods tell us specific things — important, remarkable, historically significant things.

They do not tell us everything.

The child remains, in the most fundamental sense, unknown.

A genome, a burial assemblage, a radiocarbon date.

These things are not nothing.