The human remains at sites like Bering Sinkhole and Buckeye Knoll are not merely archaeological curiosities.

They are, potentially, biological archives — repositories of genetic information that could illuminate the population history of North America in its earliest post-glacial centuries.

Ancient DNA science has transformed archaeology over the past two decades.

The ability to extract and sequence the genetic material preserved in ancient bones and teeth has made it possible to ask questions that were previously unanswerable: Who were these people, genetically?

Where did they come from?