But the continuity of ochre use in Indigenous ceremonial life across thousands of years of history connects the Anzick burial to a tradition that has not ended.

The child who was buried with red ochre twelve thousand years ago was buried within a practice that, in various forms and with various meanings, has continued to the present among the peoples who are his descendants in the broad sense the genome confirms.

This continuity — material, ceremonial, biological — is what the Anzick case ultimately points toward.

Not just a database of ancient DNA, not just a refutation of the Solutrean hypothesis, not just a contribution to debates about Clovis and the peopling of the Americas.

But a thread of human continuity stretching from a hillside in Montana twelve thousand years ago to the living communities that sent representatives to bury the child again in 2014.