Ancient genomes carry information that is genuinely important for understanding human history, and that importance is real for Indigenous communities as well as for the scientific community.

The Anzick findings — confirming the deep American roots of Native peoples and refuting hypotheses that had been used to question those roots — served Indigenous interests in ways that some Native communities recognized and appreciated.

What science owes the past is honesty about what it is doing, transparency about what the evidence shows and what it does not, meaningful engagement with the communities most directly affected by the research, and the recognition that ancient remains are not merely data but ancestors — people who had lives and families and communities that did not end with their deaths, because those lives and families and communities continued in the people who descended from them.

The Anzick child’s genome tells us something important.

His reburial, conducted with ceremony in Montana in 2014, tells us something equally important: that the obligation to the past does not end when the analysis is complete.

It continues in the care that the living take with the dead, across whatever span of time separates them.

Twelve thousand years did not diminish that obligation.

Nothing has.