The 24,000-Year-Old Boy Buried With 120 Beads And A Mammoth-Ivory Tiara — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Hidden Source Of Native American Ancestry
None of these explanations is mutually exclusive.
A high-status community member might also be a child whose death was particularly mourned.
A child believed to have spiritual significance might also be from an important family.
What can be said with confidence is that the people who prepared this burial believed that what they were doing mattered.
The investment of labor — in the beads, in the tiara, in the total assemblage — was not trivial for a community living in Ice Age Siberia.
They chose to make that investment.