The people who prepared this burial are standing at the edge of it, having done everything they knew how to do.

They do not know about Beringia.

They do not know about the Americas.

They do not know about DNA.

They do not know that 24,000 years will pass between this moment and the moment when a researcher in Copenhagen will read the sequence of their child’s genome and understand what it contains.

They know that a child they loved is dead.

They know that they have done everything possible, within the resources their world provides, to honor that death and to prepare the child for whatever they believed came next.