Most of the time, the past survives as debris scattered across millennia—animal bones here, a broken spear tip there, the fading embers of an ancient hearth. But in the rolling hills of southern Moravia, Czech Republic, archaeologists stumbled upon something more intimate: the toolkit of a prehistoric hunter who lived around 30,000 years ago.

Archaeologists discovered a curated collection of 29 blades and points, arranged in such a way that researchers believe they had once been bundled in a pouch of leather or hide. The pouch itself decayed long ago. The tools survived, frozen in place until a road collapsed in 2009 and exposed forgotten cellars beneath the village of Milovice.