They are the honest intellectual boundaries of what ancient genomics, as a discipline, is capable of answering.

Respecting those boundaries is part of telling the story accurately.

The Ethics That Science Could Not Avoid

By the time the Anzick-1 genome was published, the relationship between ancient DNA research and Indigenous communities had a history that was fraught enough to make the researchers involved in the project acutely aware of the ethical dimensions of their work.

The study of ancient Native American remains had been conducted for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in ways that treated those remains as scientific specimens rather than as the ancestors of living communities.

Human bones were excavated from burial sites, transported to universities and museums, analyzed, stored, and in some cases displayed, with little or no consultation with the communities whose dead were being studied.