That science arrived, eventually.

It arrived in a laboratory in Copenhagen and in the analytical pipelines of ancient genomics.

It arrived as a paper in Nature in 2013, published under the names of researchers who had dedicated years of technical work to the project of reading what the 24,000-year-old bones could tell.

And what they told was not what anyone had expected.

The hidden source of Native American ancestry — the Ancient North Eurasian component, the genetic signal that had appeared as an unresolved residue in population genetic models — turned out to have a location, a time, and a face: the face of a child who had died in Siberia, covered by a stone, dressed in beads, wearing a crown of mammoth ivory.

The stone that covered everything had covered, among other things, a key to understanding the ancestry of millions of people living today.