It includes actively working to ensure that the research is conducted with genuine engagement with Indigenous perspectives, that the findings are communicated in ways that are accurate and respectful, and that the genomic data generated from ancient Indigenous individuals is governed in ways that serve Indigenous community interests rather than being treated as a resource for scientific extraction.

The Population Y debate is, among other things, a test of whether the scientific community has learned from the ethical failures of the past — from the Kennewick Man dispute, from the long history of museum collections built without Indigenous consent, from the racial science that misused cranial morphology data in the service of colonial ideology.

The evidence for such learning is mixed.

There are researchers working in this area who take the ethical dimensions seriously and who engage with Indigenous communities genuinely.