The person buried at Arlington Springs, or incorporated into its sediments, was the product of a tradition that had already solved the problem of crossing water.

That tradition — wherever it came from, however it developed, whatever specific boats or rafts or watercraft it employed — was part of the founding of the Americas.

Not the whole story.

Not a complete migration model.

Not proof that every early American came by sea.

But evidence, specific and hard-won, that maritime people were on the Pacific coast of North America at the end of the Ice Age, and that they were already there when the Pleistocene megafauna were still walking the islands.

The bones cannot tell us the person’s name.