They are the trace of people whose descendants are still here — whose cultural and biological legacy is present in the Indigenous peoples of the Americas today, in the languages they speak, in the ecological knowledge they carry, in the specific cultural traditions that have been maintained and transmitted across the 24,000 years that separate the Bluefish Caves people from the present.

The cave itself is indifferent to all of this significance.

It is a limestone solution cavity above a river in the northern Yukon, cold and dark and unremarkable to look at.

But the bones in its sediment, and the marks on those bones, and the story those marks tell — about who was there, and when, and what they were doing — make it one of the most important small rooms on the North American continent.

The story of Bluefish Caves is not finished.