The people who buried her intended to seal her into the earth permanently, not to preserve her for future discovery.

The ice that kept her was an accident of the burial’s construction, not a deliberate preservation strategy.

And yet the result was a preservation so complete that two and a half millennia felt like a much shorter gap — that a woman who died in the Iron Age Altai arrived in the late twentieth century CE with her tattoos still blue and her silk blouse still intact and her headdress’s golden birds still in place.

This is what the permafrost can do.