The people of Checua were not a mystery in the sensational sense.

They were not a lost race, not an alien presence, not a people without relatives.

They were Native Americans in the fullest genetic sense — early South Americans who branched off from the common ancestor of other South American populations and developed their own genetic character on a Colombian highland.

They were fully human beings who lived and hunted and built shelters and died and were buried, as human beings have always done.

Their distinctiveness is a scientific finding, not a mystification.