The 13,000-Year-Old Child Found In Montana – And What His DNA Revealed About The First Americans

Not what did the genome say, but what should we make of what it said?

The Anzick-1 genome is a dataset.

It is a sequence of approximately three billion base pairs of DNA, extracted from the bones of a child who died more than twelve thousand years ago in Montana.

That dataset contains real biological information — information about the specific individual from whom it came, about the population he belonged to, and about the relationships between that population and others that can be compared to it.

But a genome is not a history.