His name, in whatever language his community spoke, is gone.

His face, though it can be partially reconstructed from his skull, cannot be fully restored.

His personality, his relationships, the specific moments of his short life — these are beyond any science’s reach.

But his genome tells us something real and something large about the world he belonged to and the ancestry he carried.

He was part of a population whose genetic heritage would eventually, through the complex processes of Pleistocene and post-glacial population history, contribute to the founding of the Americas.

He was, in a very long and very indirect way, an ancestor of the Indigenous peoples of two continents.