The genome hidden in those tiny bones — degraded, fragmented, chemically damaged by eleven and a half millennia of burial — was still legible enough to reveal something that no amount of stone tool analysis or radiocarbon dating or isotopic study could have shown: that the first Americans were more diverse, their history more complex, their differentiation from each other more ancient, than the models of the twentieth century had imagined.

She was basal to all of them.

Not the ancestor of all of them — that is not what basal means.

But the representative of a lineage that was there at the beginning, that split off before the main diversification began, that maintained its distinct genetic character for some ten thousand years after the split before she was born and before her tiny bones were placed in the hearth that held them for another eleven thousand years.

A lost branch of the first Americans.