We were people.

We were part of the story that eventually produced you.

That message, sent 31,000 years ago by biology rather than language, was received in 2019.

The children at Yana sent it without knowing they were sending it.

We received it without expecting what it would contain.

And what it contained — the revelation of a lost population, the illumination of an ancient connection to the ancestry of the Americas — is one of the more astonishing things that science has produced in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

The teeth were small.

The time was enormous.

The story was larger than either.

It always will be.