Conversely, cultural belonging can include adoption, alliance, marriage, and social relationships that are not reducible to biology.

This matters when interpreting Spirit Cave.

The DNA result showed the ancient individual belonged within Indigenous American ancestry and was genetically close to Native populations, including peoples in the region.

That evidence strengthened the repatriation case dramatically.

But it should not be simplified into the idea that a laboratory “proved tribal membership” in the modern bureaucratic sense.

No genome can tell us the name of a political community ten thousand years ago.

The relationship between the ancient individual and the modern Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe is built from multiple lines of evidence: geography, archaeology, tribal history, oral tradition, continuity, and genetics.

The strength of the case comes from those lines converging.

This is also why repatriation policy has increasingly recognized that affiliation should not demand impossible certainty.

Deep history rarely provides the kind of documentation available for a nineteenth-century census or treaty.