The 6,000-Year-Old People Found Near Bogotá — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Native American Lineage That Vanished From The Genetic Record

But characterizing it as proof of complete biological extinction, with zero living descendants anywhere, would exceed what the evidence can support.

The more scientifically defensible language — which the 2025 paper itself uses — is that the Checua lineage “does not contribute genetically” to the populations studied, and that its ancestry is “not detectable” in later Colombian groups or in present-day South Americans included in the analysis.

This is different from saying that every biological descendant of every Checua individual died without children.

It means that whatever happened to the Checua population — whether replacement, dilution, migration, disease, or some combination — the specific genetic character that distinguishes them as a lineage cannot be found in the places where researchers looked.