They had experiences that the stable isotope data can sketch in broad dietary terms but cannot describe.

They had relationships with specific people — parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors — that the kinship analysis can partially reconstruct in terms of biological relatedness but cannot animate as lived human experience.

They were not abstractions.

They were not illustrations of a principle or examples for a textbook.

They were children who lived in a specific place at a specific time, who were members of specific families and communities, and who came, through circumstances we cannot fully reconstruct, to be interred in an underground chamber near the greatest city of their world.

The scientific analysis that has been conducted on their remains — the ancient DNA work, the isotope analysis, the radiocarbon dating — is valuable and important work that tells us things that would otherwise be unknowable.