It cannot tell us the voices of the people who mourned him.

It cannot tell us the exact meaning of the place where he was buried.

That is one reason the repatriation debate could never be solved by science alone.

Science And The Myth Of The “First Americans”

The Spirit Cave case also exposed a recurring problem in popular discussions of ancient America: the desire to identify one simple, dramatic population as “the first Americans.”

Human history rarely works that way.

Genetic research now shows a complex pattern of migration, separation, and regional diversification.

Ancestors of Indigenous peoples entered the Americas from northeast Asia through Beringia, but once populations spread through the continents they formed many branches, adapted to different environments, and built distinct cultures over thousands of years.

Ancient DNA has helped researchers reconstruct portions of that history with much greater precision than was possible from skeletal measurements alone.

The 2018 Science study that included Spirit Cave examined ancient genomes from across the Americas.