The ancient Texans buried at Bering Sinkhole and Buckeye Knoll are not merely scientific data.

They are people — specific individuals who lived and died and were placed in sacred ground by communities that cared for them.

They are ancestors — not necessarily the biological ancestors of any specific living individual who can be named, but ancestors in the broader sense: the predecessors of the human tradition in these landscapes, part of the continuous fabric of human life on this continent.

The question of who has the right to determine what happens to those ancestors — and what science is and is not entitled to extract from their remains — is not a scientific question.