That knowledge was carried by the people who survived them, transmitted across generations in forms that may be distorted or transformed by time and circumstance but that represent a continuous thread of cultural memory stretching from the early Holocene to the present.

The genomic research does not replace that thread.

It adds another kind of evidence alongside it, one that is useful for some purposes and limited for others, and that requires careful handling to avoid producing the kind of confident misstatement that has sometimes accompanied the communication of genomic science to general audiences.

The Resolution That Is Not a Simple Ending

The Population Y story does not have a simple ending, because the science is not finished and the history it is investigating is not simple.