But the world he inhabited was already changing.

The great lake was retreating.

The climate was becoming drier.

The vast marshes that had supported dense populations along the lake margins were shrinking.

The Great Basin was undergoing the long transformation from a wet, productive landscape to the desert environment it is today — a transformation that would reshape the human ecology of the region over the following millennia.

The people who would eventually adapt to the desert that the Great Basin became — the ancestors of the Paiute and Shoshone peoples who were living in the region when Europeans arrived — were not newcomers.

The Spirit Cave Man’s genome showed that the genetic heritage of the earliest Great Basin residents was continuous with that of the peoples who came after them.