The excavation was conducted with scientific care and in accordance with the practices of its time, but it was nonetheless a disturbance of something that had not been meant to be disturbed.

What the 2016 reburial accomplished was not a complete undoing of that disturbance.

The knowledge gained from the intervening decades of analysis cannot be unknowed.

The DNA data that was extracted and published is now part of the scientific record, available for future researchers to analyze with methods that do not yet exist.

The Spirit Cave Man’s genome will continue to contribute to scientific understanding of the first Americans for as long as researchers study ancient American genomics.

But the physical remains — the actual bones and preserved tissue of a person who had lived and died and been carefully buried by his community more than ten thousand years ago — are back in the earth.