The Child In The Ground

He is known in the scientific literature as MA-1.

The designation is utilitarian: MA for Mal’ta, 1 for the first ancient DNA sample extracted from the site.

It carries none of the weight of his actual identity, which is lost, as is true of almost every human being who lived before writing.

The burial context of MA-1 has been described in published sources as including red ochre, which coated the body and the grave area.

Red ochre appears in human burials across enormous spans of time and geography — from sites in Africa dated to over 100,000 years ago, through the Upper Paleolithic of Europe and Asia, and into the relatively recent past.