The Checua people, who stood at the beginning of that picture, were the first but will not be the last ancient Colombians whose genomes are read.

The demographic history of the Altiplano — and of the broader Colombian territory — will be reconstructed, over the coming years and decades, with increasing precision and completeness.

The six-thousand-year gap between the Checua lineage’s last appearance and the present will, eventually, be filled in.

The question of what happened on the plateau between 6,000 and 2,000 years before present will be answered, at least partially, as more ancient individuals from those intermediate centuries are identified, sampled, and analyzed.

The 2025 study was a beginning.

It was the first chapter of a longer story about the human past of a country that has been inhabited for twelve thousand years and whose full demographic history has never been told.

That story is being written now.

The bones in the ground are waiting to be read.

And the first readers have already arrived.