The finding was clear: despite the dramatic cultural changes that separate the Herrera and Muisca periods — changes in political organization, ceramic styles, ritual practices, and economic complexity — the Muisca-period individuals showed genetic continuity with the Herrera-period individuals, not with the earlier Checua group.

This is an important negative result in its own right.

Some researchers had speculated that the rise of Muisca cultural complexity might have involved a new population influx that brought the social innovations associated with Muisca chiefdoms.

The genetic data does not support this.

The people who built the Muisca chiefdoms appear to have been the biological descendants of the Herrera-period population, carrying the same Central American-related ancestry that had replaced the Checua lineage roughly two thousand years earlier.

Culture changed dramatically between the Herrera and Muisca periods.