The cave painting showed at least twenty figures confronting the shadow covered with eyes. The skull-faced figures threw bones at the shadow, though it wasn’t clear if they were fighting it or feeding it. Ashley paced the length of the chamber, back toward where she had to bow her six-foot-seven frame to fit beneath the mineral-slick stone. The eyes of the monster seemed to follow her, their charcoal-darkened shadows shifting in the weak light. It made the hair on her arms rise, made it difficult to look away from the creature—as if it would move closer when her back turned.

A dozen skeletal remains filled shallow alcoves that lined the walls beneath the drawings. Beyond the alcoves, two narrow openings split the back of the cave. One led to nothing but a cavernous sinkhole. The other led to the much-trafficked cave chamber containing the remains of several cave bears. No one had known that the loose rubble wall of the cave bear room had concealed the entrance to another chamber. No one had wanted to disturb the stones and risk a cave-in. But with temperatures rising, the ice on the opposite slope had melted away, and the true entrance to the cave had opened its dark eye over the valley below.

She looked back to her sketch and darkened the space inside an eye socket, layering the charcoal until there was no hint of cream paper beneath. She leaned further over the skeletal remains in an alcove. The bones of the legs and arms were broken, but Ashley could tell from the growth plates that he died young. The bones are in bad condition—fragmented and overgrown with mineral deposits that will be difficult or impossible to remove without destroying the specimen . . .

The skulls, though, were all complete: each one with its jaw pried apart and a jar shoved between its teeth. The jars are clay or stone, perhaps dug from the cave walls? Smooth and yellowed. They’re undecorated, sealed with fine leather. They are some form of canopic jar perhaps, or an offering to the dead or the afterlife? She reached out a finger to touch the fragile leather, then pulled back. The leather remains intact despite no apparent organic matter left on the bodies themselves. It will need to be tested for ancient preservation techniques.

There wasn’t much known about Paleolithic funerary rites. Because sites like this were never found.

Most of the jars lay in shards—the pieces tumbled toward the back of the skeletons’ throats, the jaws left gaping—only fine dust remained of their contents. But there were five jars whole and tempting. Her hands kept returning to the space above the skull, hovering, as if to stroke its brow. She had never before been tempted to touch a specimen, to violate every rule that she herself had repeated incessantly to students and assistants at her sites.