The Muisca who built the chiefdoms and the gold traditions did not carry it.

The Spanish who conquered those chiefdoms did not carry it.

No one who came after, as far as the study can establish, carried the specific genetic character of the Checua people forward into the later world.

But their bones were in the earth.

And eventually, the science arrived that could read what the bones carried.

The reading revealed a previously uncharacterized basal lineage — a branch of the early South American radiation that had taken its own path on the Colombian Altiplano, developing in isolation (genetic or geographic or both) from the other South American populations that the genomic record had previously documented.

A branch that was there, and then was not.