But the child was not a reference genome.

He was a child.

He lived for three or four years in a community of hunter-gatherers in south-central Siberia, at the peak of the last Ice Age.

He grew up — for those few years — in a world of cold and darkness and mammoth hunts and carved ivory and the specific, intimate life of a small community in a demanding landscape.

He learned things, as young children always do: the names of animals, the faces of the people around him, the smell of the hearth, the feel of the cold.