They had documented physical characteristics of the ancient populations through skeletal analysis.

But they could not know the genetic character of those populations.

The tools to extract and analyze genome-wide data from ancient Colombian remains did not exist at the necessary scale, or the institutional infrastructure to apply them had not yet been built.

The 2025 study represents the moment when that changed.

The combination of advanced ancient DNA extraction techniques optimized for the petrous bone, next-generation sequencing technologies capable of reading millions of short degraded fragments, bioinformatic methods sophisticated enough to authenticate ancient sequences and compare them against comprehensive reference datasets, and the international collaborative infrastructure to bring these capabilities to Colombian archaeological materials — all of these came together in a single research project that produced Colombia’s first ancient human genomes.

The result is not just data.