Articles about this research — including from major scientific news outlets — have described the Checua people using phrases like “ghost lineage,” “complete population replacement,” “lineage that vanished,” and “unknown group of humans.” These framings are attention-grabbing and not entirely inaccurate, but they require the kind of careful qualification that has been attempted throughout this account.

“Ghost lineage” is a term sometimes used in population genetics for a population that contributed ancestry to known groups but is not itself represented by any sampled ancient or modern genome.

The Checua lineage is not quite this in the technical sense — it IS represented by sampled ancient genomes (the seven Preceramic individuals from Checua).

But the term captures something real about the relationship between the Checua population and the later populations of the same plateau: they were there, and then their genetic signature was gone.

“Complete population replacement” is the phrase Kim-Louise Krettek used in some media communications, and it accurately describes what the genetic data shows within the study’s comparison framework.