Because the ancestry he carried was part of the founding mixture that eventually, through the long passage of human populations across an Ice Age landscape, gave rise to the people of the Western Hemisphere.

The burial preserved the genome.

The genome told the story.

And the story connected a grave in Siberia to a continent that the child who lay in it would never see.

The stone has been moved.

The genome has been read.

The connection is real.

And the child — MA-1, the boy from Mal’ta, three or four years old in a world of ice and mammoths — has taken his place in the deepest and most human story there is: the story of where we all came from, and how we came to be where we are.