It is worth telling carefully, accurately, and with full acknowledgment of what it does and does not establish.

The stone has been moved.

The genome has been read.

The connection is real.

Everything else — the fullness of the child’s life, the specific nature of his community’s beliefs, the language that was spoken over his grave — is in the silence that the stone kept for 24,000 years, and that the science has not broken, because some silences are permanent.

The child was here.