Hello, I've been having an impossible time finding any articles or videos about this subject, but I am 100% positive I've heard about it from multiple sources several times. Essentially, a prehistoric grave from the Ice Age of a mammoth hunter "king" was uncovered, and his grave was filled to the brim with expensive artifacts and mammoth bones from all across the European continent. Archaeologists speculated that he must have been an incredibly important person for that reason. Can anyone link me to information on this? I'm baffled that I can't seem to find it anywhere on Google.
Thank you, historians
I don't know of a site perfectly matching your description, but when talking about richly adorned Paleolithic graves the most famous were those at Sunghir, in the western area of modern Russia. It was primarily the burial of an adult male adorned with thousands upon thousands of beads, including of material such as mammoth ivory, representing a truly staggering amount of human labor in a period that is often stereotyped as only having rugged, small bands of hunter gatherers. The burial also contained two adolescents who, crucially, both had physical deformities that would have been apparent when alive.
However we should be careful about the term "king". a "king" implies a political system, it implies permanent and inherited relations of power and subordination, it implies gradations of social ran and hierarchy, it implies political mechanisms of compulsion. It is possible these existed, I suppose, you can write a a historical fiction story about how this was King Sungir Burial I, he was buried with his two faithful manservants, he commanded the resources and labor of many territories, those who looked upon his brow despaired etc etc, but that is a lot of assumptions to make from a burial. He could have also been something like a religious figure, a Paleolithic messiah who preached a religion that was lost tens of thousands of years ago. Or he was a human equivalent of the Apis Bull, a figure with extraordinary ritual importance who did not necessarily have "power" as such. That he was important in life, or that his death was in some way important, is obvious but anything more than that gets very speculative very quickly.
When talking about issues like this I would recommend Wengrow and Graeber's Dawn of Everything, which discusses this burial but also the phenomenon of rich paleolithic burials in general at length, and takes whirlwind tour of anthropology and archaeology to show how marvelously diverse human societies are.
I would also recommend asking over in /r/AskAnthropology--the forum deals with questions like that but there are more specialists on the topic over there.