What happened in between is the question that matters most and is answered least by the current evidence.

The four-thousand-year gap in the genomic time series, the absence of ancient Colombian samples from the intermediate period, and the limits of what can be inferred from two genetic snapshots separated by thousands of years — all of these constrain what the science can currently say about the mechanism of the transition.

What happened on the Altiplano between 6,000 and 2,000 years before present remains, for now, one of the open questions in the ancient genomics of the Americas.

It is a question that motivates the next phase of research — the search for well-preserved ancient individuals from that gap period, the expansion of geographic coverage to neighboring regions, the more comprehensive sampling of both ancient and modern populations that could detect traces of Checua-related ancestry that the current comparison dataset could not find.