Their shelters are gone.

Their clothing is gone.

Their language is gone.

Their songs, their ceremonies, their relationships, their names — all of it gone.

What remains is what was durable enough and protected enough to survive 24,000 years: stone tools, ivory and bone objects, and the bones of the people who made and used them.

The researchers who extracted DNA from MA-1 were, in a very real sense, extracting the most durable thing of all: not bone, not ivory, but the molecular record of ancestry.

The genome, even degraded and fragmented, carried information that the bone itself could not have conveyed visually.