The 10,300-Year-Old Man Found Inside An Alaskan Island Cave — And The DNA Test That Revealed 10,000 Years Of Native Coastal Continuity

The first we can directly document.

The first who left enough of himself behind for the science of the twenty-first century to read.

His bones and his DNA held the beginning of a story that continues in the people who live on this coast today — who fish the same salmon runs, navigate the same waterways, and maintain the same cultural traditions of extraordinary complexity and beauty that grew from the maritime adaptation he embodied 10,300 years ago.

The cave on Prince of Wales Island still opens into the limestone.