Ancestors.

Standing on this elephant-head bluff, I often think about what it must have been like in the last days of the Ice Age. You'd see the blue ice of glaciers capping the mountains and receding into the passes, then the slow movement of distant herds feeding on the steppes below: now-extinct species of camel, long-horned bison, tapir, deer, giant sloth, and horse. You wouldn't see them at first, but sabertooth tigers, gigantic short-faced bears, and dire wolves prowl the land, stalking the grazers. The valley is wet, the high benches are pocked with pothole lakes, springs, and ponds, and mastodons browse along a braided watercourse snaking across the bottomland at the foot of the cliff.

And you'd see people. A wisp of smoke curls up from a tiny fire. A man wearing a bearskin robe squats, mixing pulverized iron oxide with his own blood on a flat rock. He prepares red ocher, the most holy of pigments, a token of life. A child has died. At the foot of the bluff, the band mourns the child who represented its future. The bluff faces north, the sacred direction from which their ancestors came, where the declining herds of great mammoths still roam.

The shaman rises; the red ocher is ready. A section of mammoth hide lies on the ground next to a shelter dug out of the soft gray clay at the foot of the bluff. Spread out on the hide are dozens of exquisitely flaked stone tools of different colors. These huge spear points, knives, and mammoth-ivory implements possess power; they are alive. The shaman carefully paints the child red, sprinkling the remaining ocher over the tools and weapons. The hide bundle is drawn taut with sinew and placed inside the shelter with the body. Large flat stones are placed over the burial to keep animals out. The people turn away, facing into the frigid wind that pours down from the mountains to the north.

That's the scene that comes to mind when I think about the small body that was laid to rest here. We know almost nothing about this child. In fact, little is known of these shadowy early people we call Clovis, who ranged across the continent at the end of the Ice Age. Beyond the unmistakable beauty and menace reflected in their mastery of tool manufacturing, this vanished culture is cloaked in conjecture and controversy. Only one partial Clovis skeleton has ever been unearthed—this child who was buried in the bluff near the Shields River—and the secrets locked within those bones could provide answers that have eluded archaeologists since the first Clovis artifacts were discovered in the Southwest 70 years ago.

Where did these people come from? Are they the ancestors of modern Native Americans? Why did their culture disappear?

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