We are looking at the bones of a fully modern human being who lived in a complex world and left behind, in the calcium and phosphorus of his skeleton, a record of a life fully lived.

He grew up somewhere.

He learned skills from someone.

He traveled.

He may have had a family.

He survived being speared.

He grew old, at least by the standards of his era.

He died beside a river, and he was buried there — whether by others who mourned him, or by the slow accumulation of sediment over a body that lay where it fell, we cannot say.

He was, in every meaningful sense, a person.

And the world he came from — the world of early Holocene North America — was not the empty stage that older historical narratives imagined.