Mammoth ivory, as we have seen, provided raw material for art objects and personal ornaments.

The community to which MA-1 belonged was, by the standards of their world, highly accomplished.

The figurines and ornaments found at Mal’ta represent dozens or hundreds of hours of skilled craft labor, and the production of such objects presupposes not just skill but the organizational capacity to create time for non-subsistence activities — time for making things that were not strictly necessary for immediate physical survival.

This is the world the child was born into and died in.