But it is a thread that connects the dark water of a Mexican cave to the living communities that have populated the Americas for twelve thousand years and more.

The thread is real.

The connection is real.

And the girl at the bottom of the Black Hole — still there, in the dark, under the Yucatán limestone — is part of that history in the most direct and most physical way imaginable.

She was here.

She was one of us, in the deepest sense.

She fell into the dark and she stayed there, and what she carried told the story.

The story of the first Americans.