And then it scales to the continental: a lost population identified through DNA, an ancestral connection traced through millennia of demographic change, a missing piece of the story of how two continents came to be inhabited.

And then it returns to the intimate: two children, in the Ice Age dark, who were alive and growing and losing their teeth in the frozen world above the Arctic Circle.

The world they lived in is gone.

The mammoths they knew are gone.

The Mammoth Steppe ecosystem they depended on is gone.

The specific genetic profile of their population has been diluted into the vast pool of subsequent human diversity, present but unrecognizable without the tools to find it.

But the teeth remained.