Stepping back from the genetics for a moment, it is worth trying to understand what the world of the Checua people actually looked like — because the environmental and ecological context of their lives helps explain why this plateau was both an attractive place to live and a setting in which demographic change could occur.

Six thousand years before the present corresponds to a period sometimes called the middle Holocene — the roughly five-thousand-year stretch between the end of the Ice Age and the beginning of the period in which agriculture and complex societies became widespread across much of the world.

In much of the Americas, this was a period of substantial environmental change: the continent was still adjusting to the end of the Pleistocene, with ecosystems shifting as climates warmed, animal populations changed, and plant communities reorganized.

The Bogotá Altiplano at 6,000 years before present was a high grassland and wetland landscape, distinctly different from the tropical environments at lower elevations to the east and west.