They were the ancestors — specific, genetically traceable ancestors — of the Native American peoples who have been here since long before any European arrived, who continue to maintain their cultures and their connections to the land, and who are the living continuation of a human presence in the Americas that the Anzick child represents in its earliest archaeologically clear form.

The child buried in Montana 13,000 years ago is someone’s ancestor.

Specifically, verifiably, genetically someone’s ancestor.

The people who came to that reburial ceremony in 2014 — the members of multiple tribes, the families with ancestral connections to the site — were not performing an abstract symbolic act.

They were honoring a family member.

That is the most important thing the burial tells us.

Not the date, not the technology, not the genetic affiliations.