The child who should have grown up.

The life that was barely started.

The specific, individual person — with a face, a voice, a personality already beginning to form — who is simply gone.

The people who prepared the burial at Mal’ta 24,000 years ago were responding to exactly this grief.

They were doing what they knew how to do, using the materials their world provided and the skills their community had developed, to mark a death in a way that felt adequate to the loss.

The adequacy they were reaching for was not a scientific adequacy.