That decision — to bury him in his moccasins — was a human decision, made by human beings who understood themselves to be doing something important for someone who mattered to them.

More than ten thousand years later, the moccasins are still there.

The Difference Between Ancestry And Belonging

One of the most important conceptual distinctions in the Spirit Cave story — one that is easy to miss in accounts focused primarily on the DNA evidence — is the difference between genetic ancestry and cultural belonging.

The DNA analysis established that the Spirit Cave Man was genetically related to Native American populations — specifically, that his genome was most closely related to the Indigenous peoples of western North America.

This is a meaningful finding.