She left behind whatever community she had belonged to — people who may or may not have known what happened to her, who may have searched for her, who may have mourned her.

She left behind her mitochondrial haplogroup — D1, the American-specific lineage that connects her unambiguously to the founding population of the hemisphere.

She left behind her skull and her bones, preserved in the cold dark of the flooded cave.

And she left behind, through the analysis of those bones and that DNA, a contribution to the understanding of human history in the Americas that is genuinely significant.

The finding that she carried haplogroup D1 helped to demonstrate that the morphological diversity of early Americans does not require a two-population model to explain.