Working carefully, she'd exposed the eye sockets and jaw and continued down the neck to find the shoulder, then followed the arm to a cluster of finger bones.
One especially interesting feature of the Jiahu Bone Flutes is that they developed and improved, whilst the earliest examples had five finger holes, later ones — seven or eight.
So imagine you're slicing a nice garlic-cheese bagel one morning, and you lacerate the distal phalanx of your pollex — in other words, you cut the tip of your thumb.
The woman's right arm curled under the older child's head. Her left arm reached out and connected with the left hand of the five-year-old in the jumbled mass of finger bones.
There, scientists had found a finger bone, three teeth, and a piece of skull, which tipped them off to the existence of a whole new lineage of ancient human.