The caves of Lagoa Santa are still there.

The bones of the ancient people are still there, in museums and in the soil.

The signal is still there, in the genomes of their descendants and in the sequencing data of the ancient specimens.

And the question — what does it mean? — is still being asked, by researchers with increasingly powerful tools and increasingly careful methods, toward an answer that is not yet complete.

That incompleteness is not a failure.