He died in the world of the Last Glacial Maximum, in a small community of hunters in south-central Siberia.

And yet his genome carried a thread that eventually ran through all of it — through the Aztec Empire and the Inuit communities of the Arctic and the Mississippian mound builders and the Pacific Northwest fishing cultures and the desert agriculturalists of the Southwest and every other expression of human cultural capacity that the Americas produced in the millennia after the founding.

That thread is real.

It is not the whole of any of those stories.