Not every child survived.

In the Ice Age Arctic, the mortality rate for children must have been significant — from cold, from disease, from the dangers inherent in a life lived near very large and dangerous animals, from the simple vulnerability of young bodies in a demanding environment.

But some children survived.

Two of them lost their milk teeth in this place and those teeth, millennia later, told a story that reaches from the Ice Age Arctic to the first Americans.

The story begins with the extraordinary: the oldest evidence for human presence north of the Arctic Circle, a site that pushed back the date of far-north habitation by thousands of years, a community that hunted mammoths and made ornaments and sewed tailored clothing in conditions that would be lethal to most modern humans.