The mammoth tusk carved into a spear foreshaft announces that it came from a world of large animals and skilled hunters.

The ivory ornament implies aesthetic sensibility, a concern for appearance, a human investment in beauty for its own sake.

And the milk tooth, shed by a child in the course of ordinary growing up, carries the complete genetic blueprint of a person — and through that person, the entire genetic history of a population that the modern world had never known existed.

Thirty-one thousand years in the permafrost.