That they were part of the early human story of the Americas — a branch of the founding radiation that took a path distinct from the other branches, lived on a Colombian plateau for thousands of years, and then, somehow, stopped appearing in the genetic record of the world they had inhabited.

Their genomes answered one question with precision: who were these people in genetic terms?

They were a previously uncharacterized, deeply divergent lineage deriving from the initial South American radiation.

This is a scientific answer.

It is a real answer.

And it changes the map.

What it does not answer — and what remains the legitimate open question at the end of this story — is exactly how, in the four thousand years between 6,000 and 2,000 years before present, a population that had been established on one of South America’s most significant highland corridors lost its detectable presence in the genetic record, and what the specific human experiences of that transition were for the people who lived through it.

That question will require more bones, more DNA, and more time.