This is a statement about social solidarity.

About the commitment of a community to its young.

About the investment in a future that required surviving the present.

And now, 31,000 years later, those children’s teeth have helped scientists understand a major chapter in the human story.

Their genomes — preserved in enamel and dentine, protected by permafrost — told the story of a lost population and illuminated, however indirectly, the ancestry of hundreds of millions of people whose ancestors eventually crossed from Siberia into the Americas.

The children who lost those teeth did not know any of this.