Not a central chapter — he died in Siberia, decades or centuries before the events that would eventually lead to the peopling of the Americas, and the specific population-level processes that led to the Americas’ founding are still being worked out.

But a genuine part: a data point, a reference genome, a clear signal of the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry that was one of the building blocks of the Americas.

The Last Image

The grave is empty now.

The stone has been moved.

The beads and ornaments are in museum cases, studied and measured and photographed.

The bones are in storage, their DNA extracted and sequenced and published and compared and debated and built upon in the ongoing work of ancient genomics.

But try, for a moment, to imagine the original scene.