The scientific confirmation of 10,000 years of coastal ancestry has been incorporated into the broader discourse of Northwest Coast Indigenous rights and identity in ways that are specific to each community’s needs and contexts.

The cave itself continues to be a site of ongoing research potential.

The sediment that fills it holds, in principle, a record of the environmental and human history of the island that extends from the present back to the period of deglaciation.

Future excavations, conducted with the consultation and cooperation of the relevant Native communities, may reveal additional evidence that extends and refines the picture established by the initial discovery.

The legacy of the On Your Knees Cave research is, ultimately, the story that was read from a set of ancient remains in a limestone cave on a remote Alaskan island — a story about a man who lived before civilization, on a coast he shared with the biological ancestors of the people who live there today, in a maritime world of extraordinary richness and complexity that has sustained human life for 10,000 years.