The mountain held him for nearly nine thousand years.

The science made him visible.

The rest remains in the dark.

The Specific Weight Of Physical Evidence

In the study of the deep human past, direct physical evidence is rarer than the volume of published research might suggest.

Most of what archaeologists know about early Americans comes from stone tools — durable objects that survive the thousands of years between their making and their discovery in ways that organic materials almost never do.

Stone tools can be typed, attributed to technological traditions, and dated by their stratigraphic context, but they tell us relatively little about the specific individuals who made and used them.