None of this was built specifically for the Spirit Cave case.

All of it was available to be applied to it when the partnership between Willerslev and the Tribe made the analysis possible.

This is how science works.

Individual discoveries — like the 1940 excavation of the Spirit Cave burial, or the 2016 agreement that allowed DNA sampling — are embedded in broader scientific contexts that give them their meaning and their power.

The Spirit Cave Man’s genome was extraordinary because the science that could read it had been extraordinary in its own development.