The Spirit Cave Man cannot speak.

But the community that received him home can.

And what they have always said — that they have been here for a very long time, that this landscape is their homeland, that the ancient people of the caves and the marshes are their ancestors — has now been confirmed in the most molecular terms available to modern science.

They were right.

The Molecule That Spoke Across Ten Thousand Years

In the end, the story of the Spirit Cave Man is a story about many things: the accident of discovery, the persistence of a legal dispute, the advance of scientific technology, the willingness of a scientist and a tribe to build a different kind of relationship, the resolution of a debate that had implications far beyond one cave in Nevada.