What survives is a tiny, non-random fraction of what existed: the things that happened to be made of durable materials, that happened to be deposited in favorable preservation environments, that happened to be found and recognized and preserved by people who understood their significance.

The Trail Creek tooth is a member of this surviving fraction.

A deciduous incisor, made of hydroxyapatite mineral and collagen protein, deposited in an alkaline cave sediment on a limestone ridge of the Alaskan Seward Peninsula, surviving 9,000 years of geological change, excavated by a Danish team in 1949, transported to Copenhagen, stored in institutional collections, rediscovered in 2016, dated and analyzed with methods that did not exist when it was collected, and finally taking its place in the scientific literature as evidence for an ancient population branch that persisted in Alaska thousands of years longer than researchers had previously known.

The journey of that tooth — from the mouth of a child alive in the early Holocene to a paper in the journal Science in the twenty-first century — is one of the more improbable journeys in the history of archaeological science.