The Bering Sinkhole population also yielded a discovery that was remarkable in a purely biological sense.

Among the individuals deposited in the sinkhole, one woman was found to have experienced a lithopedion — a stone baby.

This is the rare obstetric circumstance in which a fetus that has died and cannot be delivered begins to calcify within the mother’s living body, essentially being incorporated into her tissues as a calcified mass over years or decades.

The lithopedion from Bering Sinkhole dates to approximately 1100 BCE and is the earliest documented case of this phenomenon in the entire human medical record.

She had carried this within her for years, perhaps decades.