Finding that answer is now one of the most important objectives in the ancient genomics of the Americas.

The Checua people were on the high plateau of Colombia for thousands of years.

They had adapted to its altitude, its climate, its ecological rhythms.

They had developed a genetic character that marks them as distinct from every other early South American population so far documented.

And then, in the gap that science has not yet bridged, they disappeared from the genetic record of the world they had inhabited.

How, and when, and why remains to be discovered.