But its deep roots extend back to the Folsom hunters who were among the first to specialize in bison exploitation after Clovis, and those Folsom hunters were themselves the direct descendants of the Clovis people whose most elaborate known burial is the Anzick site.

The connections are real, even if they are not simple or direct.

The 13,000-year thread from the Anzick child to the Crow tribal members who attended the child’s reburial ceremony runs through all of this history — through the Folsom bison hunters, through the Archaic period cultures that developed diverse subsistence strategies across the continent, through the Late Prehistoric cultures that built the mound complexes and developed agriculture in different parts of the Americas, through the contact-period populations that encountered European colonization, and through the contemporary Native American communities that maintain their identities, their cultural practices, and their connections to their ancient homelands.

That thread is what the genetic evidence from Anzick confirmed.