Like the Texas sites, it documents a population using a specific location as a cemetery over a long period, accompanied by offerings that reflect both practical and symbolic concerns.

The Spirit Cave mummy from Nevada, preserved in the dry conditions of the Great Basin interior, provides a single individual from roughly 10,600 years before present whose genome has been fully sequenced.

The Spirit Cave individual belongs to a lineage that is ancestral to some modern Native American populations, consistent with the picture of genetic continuity across the Holocene.

But the Spirit Cave individual also shows a cranial morphology that was initially described as differing from modern Native Americans — a finding that sparked the debate about whether the earliest Americans were biologically more diverse than their modern descendants.