He died in Siberia, far from the route that led to the Americas.

But the genetic heritage of his population was part of the ancestral mixture that eventually made the founding population.

In that sense, across the vast distance of 24,000 years and the vast geographic distance from Lake Baikal to the Americas, he is connected to the entire subsequent history of the Western Hemisphere.

That connection is not the most important thing about the Western Hemisphere or about the Indigenous peoples who populated it.

The history of the Americas is the history of those peoples — their adaptations, their cultures, their histories, their relationships to their specific landscapes — and that history vastly exceeds in richness and complexity what any single ancient genome can represent.