Modern researchers who have visited the location — bringing their headlamps and their protective gear and their team members and their surveying equipment — have seen, on the walls of the passages, the dark smudge marks that the ancient torch left on the cave surface.

Marks that are thousands of years old, preserved by the same stable conditions that preserved the man’s bones.

Marks that are the only other direct physical trace of his presence in the cave besides the bones themselves.

Those marks were not made recently.

They are not the marks of the 1988 cavers who found the bones.

They are not the marks of the archaeologists and researchers who subsequently visited the site.

They are the marks left by an ancient torch, carried by an ancient man, in the years when the Rocky Mountains were a different landscape than they are today.