To put it in perspective: this child was alive roughly 4,500 years before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.

She was alive more than 6,000 years before the beginning of the Roman Republic.

She was alive in a world without writing, without the wheel, without any of the major civilizations that dominate our understanding of “ancient history.” She was alive at a moment when the landscapes shaped by the last Ice Age were still relatively fresh — when some of the ecological transformations associated with the transition from glacial to interglacial conditions were still ongoing.

For the specific context of Alaskan human prehistory, the age is particularly significant.