The materials recovered from any excavation carry more information than the questions being asked at the time of recovery.

Future questions — questions enabled by future technology — may reveal entirely new dimensions of significance in collections already housed in museum drawers.

The Yana collection is now a resource for ancient DNA research in a way that could not have been anticipated in 2001 or 2002.

The teeth were preserved because they were recognized as human remains of archaeological significance.

Their DNA was readable because the permafrost had done its preserving work and because twenty-first-century sequencing technology had advanced to the point of making ancient genome recovery possible.

The convergence of these factors — good archaeological practice, permafrost preservation, and advanced molecular technology — produced a discovery whose importance reaches far beyond what any single one of these factors could have achieved alone.