The cave preserved his remains because of the specific chemistry of its limestone geology and the specific climate of the island.

His remains preserved, in turn, the evidence of a life and an ancestry that the science of the twenty-first century could finally read.

What that reading revealed was not simply scientific data.

It was a recognition — specific, quantified, genomically grounded — that the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast have been right all along about the depth of their connection to this land.

The oral traditions that maintained this connection across the generations without the benefit of scientific confirmation were not legend or myth but historical memory — the accumulated knowledge of a people who have been here, on this coast, for approximately 10,000 years.