One day in 2008, Nikolai Peristov, a sculptor who worked with mammoth ivory noticed what appeared to be a human femur protruding from the muddy bank. Like most people unlucky enough to find themselves in this situation, Peristov contacted the authorities, presumably fearing the worst. Forensic analysis of the bone however, revealed something strange: this individual couldn't have died at any point in the last decade, or century for that matter. After some time, it was transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology for further analysis, where a group paleoanthropologists discovered something remarkable: this person, a man, had died some 45,000 years ago. This on its own would be a career defining find for any researcher, but the desiccated appendage apparently had yet another surprise to offer. Whereas one would be hard pressed to find an Egyptian mummy older than ~2000 years well-preserved enough to warrant the effort of attempting to extract DNA, this oddly intact femur was fresh enough to where after tens of thousands of combined man hours, these scientists were able to recover genetic material, and sequence the genome of this individual. At the time their findings were published, 2014, this was the oldest anatomically modern human genome ever decoded. More than a decade later, the Ust'Ishim man has lent invaluable insight into the chronology of human migrations out of Africa and allowed us to paint a more detailed picture of an otherwise obscure period in our past.