In the 2010s, the technology to read the molecules in his ancient bones finally existed, and a partnership built on trust and mutual respect created the conditions in which that technology could be applied.

In 2018, the results were published: he was who the Tribe had always said he was.

He was Native American.

He was the ancestor of the people who had been fighting for him for twenty years.

And he was home.

The molecule that spoke across ten thousand years said what oral tradition had always known: that the people of this landscape are ancient, that their connection to it is real, and that the story of the first Americans is ultimately the story of the living communities that have carried that ancient heritage forward — through the drying of the lakes and the changing of the climate and the arrival of people who did not understand what they were encountering — to the present day.

The cave in Nevada is quiet now.