This is the miracle of permafrost preservation made concrete and comprehensible: a child’s tooth, lost in the Arctic 31,000 years ago, still carries the genetic blueprint of the child who lost it.

The question was what that blueprint would say.

The World They Lived In

Before the DNA story can be told properly, the world has to be reconstructed.

Because the world that these children inhabited was so different from anything that exists today that it requires an act of imagination to place them in it — an imagination informed by evidence, by paleoclimate records and paleoecological reconstructions and the deep archive of the frozen Siberian ground.

Thirty-one thousand years ago, the Earth was in the depths of what geologists call the Last Glacial Period — the most recent Ice Age, which reached its maximum intensity around 20,000 years ago before beginning the long warming that produced the modern world.