It also matters in less tangible but equally important ways.

The knowledge that one’s people have been on their homeland for 10,000 years — that the connection is not a few centuries old but a depth of presence that spans the entirety of recorded human history — is a different kind of knowledge than the mere fact of presence.

It is knowledge about who you are, where you come from, and what your community’s relationship to its place in the world actually is.

For communities that have been told, through the mechanisms of colonialism, that their traditions are recent, that their cultures are primitive precursors to something more sophisticated, that their connections to their lands are not as deep or as legitimate as the claims of others — for those communities, the scientific confirmation of 10,000-year continuity is not simply interesting.