The Muisca communities of today are real communities with real histories — histories that include the pre-Columbian period, the colonial period, the struggle for legal recognition, and the ongoing processes of cultural revitalization — regardless of what the ancient genomic record reveals about population movements two or four thousand years ago.

What the genetic research does provide is a richer and more complex understanding of the demographic history of the Altiplano — one that reveals the depth and complexity of the population changes that preceded the Muisca period, and that contextualizes the Muisca cultural complex within a longer story of migration, replacement, and transformation on the plateau.

This richer history is not a threat to contemporary Indigenous identity.

It is an addition to it — a deepening of the historical record that acknowledges the dynamism and complexity of the Altiplano’s human past rather than flattening it into a simple narrative of continuous occupation.