What science could not recover was the reason for the journey.

Not the haplogroup, not the radiocarbon date, not the CT scan or the protein analysis or the population genetic comparison — nothing that any laboratory can do — can answer the question of why a man crawled through mud and cold and darkness more than a thousand feet into a mountain, carrying his flickering light, in a year roughly eighty-eight centuries before anyone would be able to ask.

That question is the one the cave keeps.

The bones have been studied.