Roughly 27,500 years ago, a 15-year-old boy was brutally mauled by a bear in Arene Candide in today’s Liguria, Italy. The attack tore through his jaw, neck and left shoulder. He was dying, but he was not alone in his final moments.

Instead, his community carried him to a cave, packed his wounds and stayed with him for days until he died. Then they laid him on a bed of red ochre (a natural clay pigment) and buried him.

When archeologists uncovered his remains in May 1942, they found him adorned with hundreds of perforated shells and deer canines forming a cap around his head, mammoth ivory pendants, four decorated elk antler batons and a flint blade still clutched in his right hand — they nicknamed him “il Principe,” or “the Prince.” His lavish burial goods suggested that he either held high social status or was deeply revered.

The popular conception of Ice Age life — brutal, isolated, based on “survival of the fittest” — leaves little room for care and grief when it comes to death. Yet the burial of “the Prince” shows how humans have long used objects and rituals to remember their loved ones.

A cave set aside for the dead

The archeological site of Arene Candide is an........

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