The bones recovered from the hardship and resumed growing, leaving the lines as permanent markers of what had been endured.

This is not evidence of a particularly wretched or exceptional life.

It is, rather, evidence of what growing up in the terminal Pleistocene landscape of the Snake River Plain was actually like for many or most people.

The resources of the environment — the salmon, the game, the plant foods — were real and sometimes abundant.

They were also seasonal, subject to year-to-year variation, and dependent on the success of hunting and fishing efforts that could fail for reasons beyond human control.

A bad salmon run, a year with scarce game, a winter that lasted too long before spring resources became available — any of these could produce the nutritional stress that arrested bone growth.