The La Brea Tar Pits museum is a typical Los Angeles pale slab of a building set in the white concrete expanse of an LA business district. The tarpits are a black, fenced-in lake outside the building, with tar accumulating around the edges and bubbling up in a globe near the center. There was a depresssing sculpture of a mammoth sinking into the tar while another mammoth and a distressed baby mammoth watched.

Only one human skeleton, apparently, has ever been exhumed from the tar pit, a woman in her twenties or thirties who died several thousand years ago. She’d been clubbed over the head, her body tossed into the pit and was probably, as the museum put it, “the victim of a homicide.” Strange, hearing the word “homicide” for something that happened in prehistory. Her little skeleton was mounted in a darkened room with a glass window. You would peer in, see the skeleton, and then the lights would dim and you would see, superimposed on it, an artist’s conception of how she had looked, a smiling, stocky young woman with long black hair and bare breasts. Again, the lights would dim and again, we would see the skeleton.