Building relationships across the cultural and institutional distances between a university archaeology program and the Indigenous communities with traditional territory at the site is not the work of a single meeting or a single season.

It is the work of years.

The peer review process through which the results were evaluated before publication in Nature — the scrutiny of the methods, the examination of the demographic models, the comparison of the results against alternative interpretations — added additional time and additional rigor.

The result that was published in 2018 was more carefully tested and more robustly supported than a finding that had moved from discovery to publication in a matter of months could have been.

This slow movement from discovery to understanding — this gap between the moment when the bones were found and the moment when the genome spoke — is part of the real story of how science works.