But it surpasses all previous Great Basin cave finds in one crucial dimension: the antiquity of the preserved human remains, and the quality of the DNA that those remains yielded.

The 2018 study that published the Spirit Cave Man’s genome was not simply a study of one cave and one burial.

It was a contribution to a much larger and longer ongoing project: the effort to understand the deep human history of a region that has been inhabited continuously for more than ten thousand years — and that continues to be inhabited today by the communities whose ancestors that long history comprised.

What We Learn From The Moccasins