The Checua people were one chapter of that history — a chapter that had not been read before.

Their genomes preserve the signature of an early South American population that took an independent trajectory on the Bogotá Altiplano, developing a distinct genetic character that does not appear in the later populations of the same plateau or in the present-day South American populations included in the comparison dataset.

By approximately 2,000 years before present, that genetic character had been replaced.

The people of the Herrera period carried ancestry related to Central American populations — the Isthmus of Panama, the Chibchan-speaking communities of that region — that bore no detectable trace of the earlier Checua lineage.