The 2025 paper reported that the research team had achieved this.

Working with material from five archaeological sites on the Altiplano, they recovered genome-wide data from 21 ancient individuals spanning roughly 5,500 years of the plateau’s occupation.

The study represented an eleven-fold increase in the ancient DNA sample size available for Colombia, starting from essentially zero.

The oldest of those individuals came from Checua.

The Site And The People Who Lived There

Checua is an open-area settlement site — not a cave, not a rock shelter, but an outdoor location where people lived on a hill in the Checua River valley, in what is now the municipality of Nemocón in Cundinamarca Department, roughly forty kilometers north of the center of Bogotá.