The government repatriated the remains.

The tribe reburied the ancestor.

That sequence is remarkable enough on its own.

But the deepest irony lies in what the DNA changed.

For years, the extraordinary age of the Spirit Cave individual had been used to create distance between him and living Native peoples.

The genome made the opposite relationship visible.

His age did not place him outside Native history.

It showed how deep that history could reach.

An Ancestor, Not A Scientific Ending

There is a temptation to end the Spirit Cave story with a triumphant scientific sentence: DNA solved the mystery.