If people were in southern Chile more than 14,000 years ago, they must have been somewhere considerably north of there well before that — and the evidence for that earlier northern presence was sparse, contested, and incompatible with the ice-free corridor route that the Clovis-first model required.

The Anzick child, buried with his magnificent tools in the Montana hillside, was a piece of a puzzle that was becoming more complicated with every passing decade of research.

His DNA would eventually add the most powerful single piece of evidence the debate had seen.

How Long The Child Waited

From the time the Anzick site was disturbed in 1968 until the genome publication in 2014, forty-six years passed.

In that period, the human remains were studied, stored, discussed, and debated.