It required a tribal community willing to extend trust to a scientific establishment that had earned distrust.

It required a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management — willing to accept that the governance framework it had constructed around the Spirit Cave remains needed to change.

And it required a scientific methodology — ancient DNA analysis — powerful enough to address directly the question at the center of the dispute.

Without any one of those elements, the case might not have been resolved the way it was.

Willerslev without the Tribe’s trust could not have obtained the samples.