The cave that contains her remains has been excavated, meter by painstaking meter, by archaeologists who had no way of knowing what they would find.

The fragment of bone that holds her story was noticed by researchers using a technique that had barely existed a decade before, identified as hominin through protein analysis, subjected to ancient DNA extraction in a facility designed to make such things possible, and sequenced using technology that would have been unimaginable to the people who made her.

The intersection of the ancient and the modern — of a 90,000-year-old biological event and twenty-first century molecular biology — produced a story that the world did not expect.

The Philosophical Dimensions