It holds the ongoing life of the communities that have been here since before the record that science can read — communities whose presence in this valley is older than 11,500 years, older than USR1 herself, extending back to the founding of the hemisphere’s human population and forward into a present that is still being made.

Why Simplified Retellings Miss The Point

There is a version of the Upward Sun River story — a simplified version — that says something like: scientists found a 12,000-year-old baby in Alaska, sequenced her DNA, and discovered a lost lineage of ancient people who were different from Native Americans.

This version is wrong in its most important detail, and the detail matters.

The Ancient Beringian lineage was not different from Native Americans.