It is the blink of an eye in geological time.

But it is long enough that every human institution, every language, every culture, and every form of social organization that existed when the Anzick child was buried has long since transformed beyond recognition or disappeared entirely.

And yet the connection persists.

The Native American people who came to honor the Anzick child in 2014 were not honoring an abstraction — a statistical relationship expressed in genetic percentages.

They were honoring a real person, a child who lived and died in their ancestral territory, who was part of the same line of human descent that eventually produced them.