It told us that the mitochondrial DNA she inherited from her mother, who inherited it from her mother, going back as far as that line reaches, belonged to an American-specific haplogroup.

It confirmed that she was, in her maternal lineage, part of the founding population of the Americas.

What it could not tell us is the full complexity of what happened in those twelve thousand years between Naia’s death and the world of the people who lived on the Yucatán when Chichén Itzá was at its height.

Those twelve thousand years are not a blank.

They are a period of enormous change — ecological, demographic, cultural, and biological.