The moral logic was always the same.

The scientific and legal tools to articulate it clearly took time to develop.

The Thirteen Thousand Miles Of Ancient DNA

When Victor Moreno-Mayar and his colleagues published the 2018 Science paper that included the Spirit Cave Man’s genome, one of their most striking observations concerned the relationship between ancient individuals from geographically distant locations.

The Spirit Cave Man, from Nevada, was compared genetically to the Lagoa Santa individuals from Brazil — ancient people who lived in the region of what is now Minas Gerais approximately 10,000 years ago.

Despite the thirteen-thousand-mile distance between Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa, and despite the thousands of years of human history that separated the founding of Great Basin communities from the founding of Brazilian communities, the genetic similarities between these ancient individuals were considerable.