The Anzick site is a single point — one burial, one child, one set of artifacts, one date — in what is now an extensive and still-growing body of evidence about the first Americans.

But it is a point of extraordinary informational density, and what it has contributed to the understanding of American prehistory reaches far beyond its physical dimensions.

The Clovis child buried in the Montana sandstone 13,000 years ago was a member of the founding population of the Americas.

The ancient DNA from those bones established, beyond reasonable scientific doubt, that the Clovis people were the ancestors of modern Native American peoples.

The child’s genome showed the closest genetic affinity to Native American populations — specifically to Central and South American populations, in a pattern consistent with the Clovis expansion as a founding demographic event for the entire Western Hemisphere.