He was not a visitor from elsewhere.

He was not evidence of a lost European migration or an Asian wave that left no descendants.

He was, in the deepest biological sense available to modern science, a relative — an ancient relative, but a relative — of millions of people living today.

That finding, published in the journal Nature in 2014, set off debates that are still continuing.

It answered some questions definitively.

It raised others that had not previously been asked.

And it returned, eventually, to the most basic question of all: who was this child, and what do we owe him?

The Montana Hillside

The Anzick site sits in Wilsall, Montana, in Park County — a landscape of high plains and foothills in the western part of the state, within sight of the Crazy Mountains to the north and the Absaroka Range to the south.

The terrain is dramatic and open, the kind of landscape where weather comes fast from multiple directions and where the horizon seems both close and enormous at the same time.

In 1968, two construction workers — Ben Hargis and Calvin Sarver — were working on a property owned by the Anzick family when they uncovered what appeared to be an unusual concentration of soil and material in a natural rock shelter or overhang on the hillside.

The material they disturbed included human bone fragments and the stone and bone artifacts that would eventually be identified as among the most significant archaeological finds in North American prehistory.

The circumstances of the initial discovery were not ideal from an archaeological perspective.

The site was not found during a controlled excavation.