Three years ago, around this time, I was traveling on a regional train through eastern Germany. He had just given a lecture at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, and was returning to Spain with a scientific assignment: to analyze a block of earth from the site of Panga ya Saidi (Kenya) that I carried in a box, on my knees. Two teeth that I recognized as human were barely visible on the surface of the block. I didn't know then that, in reality, in my lap - in the colo, in Galician— wore the body of a child just three years old, whose loss had made a family suffer more than 78,000 years ago.
