Were they offerings to supernatural beings who controlled what happened to the dead?

Were they expressions of grief by the living, a way of giving the child everything they could give him because they could no longer give him anything else?

These questions cannot be answered from the physical evidence.

The beliefs of the Mal’ta people are not recoverable from their burials or their figurines or their tools.

The symbolic meanings they attributed to red ochre, to mammoth-ivory headpieces, to carved birds, to the color and arrangement of beads — all of this is as permanently lost as the language they spoke.

What is not lost is the fact of the belief — the evidence that people acted on commitments and understandings that went beyond the immediately practical.