Not every site will yield usable ancient DNA, even from the relevant period.

But the identification and careful excavation of sites with good preservation potential — like Upward Sun River — will yield, over time, the additional genomes that will fill in the picture that USR1 opened up.

The Living Relationship To The Dead

In the Athabascan cultural tradition, as in many Indigenous traditions across North America and the world, the dead do not cease to be members of the community at the moment of their death.

The relationship between the living and the dead is maintained through ceremony, through memory, through the specific cultural practices that acknowledge the ongoing presence of ancestors in the lives of their descendants.