The comparison is not coincidental.

Both traditions — Siberian and European — produced female figurines during the same broad period of human prehistory.

Whether this reflects shared cultural ancestry, long-distance transmission of ideas, or parallel independent development in response to shared human symbolic needs has been debated for decades.

The DNA evidence, as we will see, would eventually add a new dimension to that debate.

Alongside the figurines, the excavations produced evidence of dwelling structures reinforced with large animal bones, stone tool assemblages of the kinds associated with Paleolithic hunting cultures, and the remains of the animals that the Mal’ta community hunted and ate: woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, horses, and bison.

And, in a specific location within the site, the burial of a very young child.