Each line represents a period when the body stopped growing — when resources were insufficient, when disease struck, when something went wrong that the growing skeleton recorded and preserved.

She had experienced repeated periods of stress throughout her youth, the kind of stress that comes from food shortage, from disease, from the unpredictable conditions of life in a post-glacial landscape.

She recovered from each episode.

She survived to young adulthood.

And then she died, for reasons that the skeleton could not reveal.

There was no evidence of traumatic injury.

There was no obvious cause of death visible in the bone.