Windover demonstrated that waterlogged, peat-preserved tissue could also yield recoverable genetic material.

This was an important methodological advance for the field, not a population history revelation.

The headlines that announced “8,000-year-old brains yield DNA” were accurate in the narrow technical sense and misleading in the larger sense.

What was yielded was evidence that human DNA existed in the preserved tissue and could be detected — not a readable genome, not a family tree, not an answer to who these people were or where they came from.

The fuller ancient DNA analysis of the Windover population came in later years, as technology improved and as researchers returned to the preserved materials.