The team working on the excavation thought they'd just found another pile of knapped flints that happened to have fallen in a vaguely human shape. Old, certainly, up against the beginning of the Paleolithic, but not unusual.
The discovery might have been lost, except that the site was in a rather narrow canyon. A doll paleobotanist carrying samples to the site lab happened to be threading the narrow path near the dig team as they were puzzling out what they'd found.
She took one look over the dig leader's shoulder, shrieked, grabbed him by his shirt, chattered something the team couldn't make out, slapped him across the face, and then immediately apologized.
"Ow!"
"I'm sorry! I thought you'd damaged it!"
"Damaged what?"
"It! It, you fool, do you really not recognize…"
"Recognize…"
"Ah," she hugged herself in frustration, "my apologies again."
"Dr. Helianthus? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Well. No. Maybe. Anyway, it's not me that is important in this situation. I realize now that likely none of you have the right kind of sight to see, but we know our own. There is a completely Still doll in the bottom of your excavation."
"Can't be. The flints? That's Strata H matrix they're in. Much further down and we'd be in the Pliocene."
"Then you'd better get it out carefully, hmm?"
By afternoon, all of the site's dolls were either ringing the excavation watching, or down in the pit with tiny tools, working very, very cautiously.
Almost a thousand years of frames were represented at the dig, from aramid fiber and carbon composite superlights like Helianthus, all the way back to the pale blue-white of tiny Zetian, who had been an administrator in Xingzhou when porcelain was new.
They were all mayflies compared to what they had found.
The last flint was freed from the matrix. The assemblage was a little more recognizably humanoid, but abstract. Its hands were sharp blades of flint.
"Well… I don't know what I was expecting."
"If someone left you under two million years of strata, you'd probably need a minute too."
They watched it for hours. Dolls are very good at watching and waiting. There was no motion.
One of them began singing.
"Zetian?"
"What? We used to sing it to the new ones at the kiln. Felt right."
She continued for a time.
"I just… did anyone else see that?"
"I want to have seen it but I'm not sure."
"Maybe if we had more singers… If none of you playthings have had a classical education, we can do this in English." Someone tittered at the doll slur. "Come on. Anyone know a lullaby?"
After a few false starts, they converged on the one song every doll there actually knew.
"And all the roads we have to walk are winding…"
"And all the lights that lead us there are blinding…"
Somewhere in the crowd, Helianthus covered her eyes in embarrassment and kept singing anyway.
But it felt right, somehow. The rhythm was what was important, not the lyrics. And the ancient flint must have felt it too. Down in the pit, it resonated, and rose. If it ever had joints, they were long gone, but the shape and memory remained.
"And after all…"
As did the edges.
"That's a combat doll."
"Oh, grit."
The dolls of the dig took some damage pinning it down again. Nothing irreparable. Dresses torn, wood chipped, aramid gouged. One paleobotanist would refuse full reconstruction and decide to keep the epoxy field patch on her cheek as a badge of honor.
It took months to teach the "Dawnhunter" enough language for it to explain its plight:
The very first dolls on Earth were not expected to be rewound (the term changed with each age, now generic). They were made, as tools, and then the energies of their making slowly dissipated.
"Everything was short back then. We knew nothing. And you look human but not like my humans. An interloper band. I thought I had failed at my hunt and even my little span would be cut shorter."
It didn't have much of a face, but Helianthus (she wasn't getting much botany done these days but so what) had learned enough of its body language, or it had learned enough of hers, to guess at a sort of regret.
"That's horrible."
"Yes. But now I am here and it is not important that I did not bring an antelope back to my makers." It paused. "There are so many kinds of doll now. They are Still or not, as they please. They have," it gestured with its blades, "hands."
"Do you want hands? The ethics committee was surprised you hadn't asked earlier."
"I want both. I am greedy now. I have seen so many things, and I want to touch them, and yet I also want what I was built with."
"Our frame shop is very good. It may take a while to get right, but… how could we not?"
"Another thing I want. Maybe. The coverings you wear. The humans also. Are these 'gender'? I want to try gender."
It took a few more months to explain that one to her.