He took the time to acquaint himself with the Tribe, kept us well-informed of the process, and was available to answer our questions.

His new study confirms what we have always known from our oral tradition and other evidence — that the man taken from his final resting place in Spirit Cave is our Native American ancestor.”

The statement also offered a phrase that captured something essential about the experience of the previous decades: “It’s similar to us not being able to bury our grandmother and her skull put on a shelf somewhere.”

That analogy — simple, human, devastating in its accuracy — was a reminder that the debate that scientists had been conducting in academic journals and legal briefs was, at its core, about something much more intimate: the right of a community to care for its dead.