It changed the legal status of the Spirit Cave Man by resolving a twenty-year repatriation dispute and returning an ancestor to the community that had been claiming him throughout.

And it changed — or at least contributed to changing — the conversation about what archaeological science owes to living Indigenous communities whose ancestors are the subject of that science.

What remained was not a tidy resolution but the acknowledgment of complexity.

The Spirit Cave case was resolved, but it was resolved through the specific efforts of specific people — Eske Willerslev’s willingness to build a genuine partnership, the Tribe’s willingness to risk engagement with a scientific establishment that had disappointed them before — not through the creation of a universal framework that guaranteed similar resolutions in other cases.

Thousands of ancient Native American remains are still held in institutional collections around the United States, their repatriation delayed by bureaucratic inertia, resource constraints, and in some cases the same kinds of morphological debates that had complicated the Spirit Cave case.