It will continue for as long as researchers study ancient American DNA, because his genome, analyzed under the specific conditions and with the specific methods of the late 2010s, will be re-analyzed with the improved methods of the future, and each reanalysis will potentially reveal something new.

But for the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, the Storyteller’s story has a different kind of continuation — one that is not about genomic databases but about the ongoing life of a community in its homeland.

The community that fought for him for two decades is still there.

The land that he was buried in — the landscape of the ancient Lahontan Basin, now mostly desert but still marked by the ecological history of the ancient lake that once filled it — is still their landscape.

The ancient lake is gone.