The science is more tractable; the humanity is more important.

Together, they make the story of MA-1 — the boy buried with 120 beads and a mammoth-ivory tiara, 24,000 years ago, in south-central Siberia — one of the most significant and most moving in the entire history of the study of the first Americans.

The stone was placed with care.

The genome was read with precision.

And the connection between a grave near Lake Baikal and the ancestry of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere was revealed.

That is the story.