It provided a new data point in the ongoing effort to understand the origins of Native American peoples.

It demonstrated, once again, that the Late Pleistocene human world was populated by many more genetically distinct groups than the modern landscape suggests — and that the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Americans were shaped by a deep and complex history of population mixing that involved communities like the one at Yana.

The teeth themselves are small.

Children’s milk teeth.

The kind of biological objects that parents keep in little boxes, objects that seem too ordinary to carry the weight of a great discovery.

But the ordinary is often where the deepest history hides.