The people who mined salt at Nemocón in the Muisca period were not genetically related, in any detectable way, to the hunter-gatherers who had lived on the same plateau four thousand years earlier.

The Muisca maintained elaborate ritual and ceremonial practices, including the ceremony at Lake Guatavita in which gold and emeralds were cast into the sacred lake as offerings — the ceremony that inspired the El Dorado legend.

Muisca cosmology was sophisticated and well-documented by colonial-era Spanish sources, though the accuracy and completeness of those sources is debated by scholars.

The Muisca were also the creators of the architecture and infrastructure that organized the plateau’s landscape — roads, causeways across wetland areas, terracing for agriculture, and the planned layouts of settlement sites that archaeologists have been documenting for decades.

The genetic evidence from the 2025 study places all of this Muisca achievement in the context of the Central American-related ancestry that had replaced the earlier Checua lineage approximately two thousand years before Spanish contact.