They were skilled, sophisticated, and successful inhabitants of their landscapes — people who had built deep knowledge of the environments they lived in, who maintained complex social and trade relationships across the continent, and whose lives, while different from ours in every practical respect, reflected the same fundamental human qualities of social complexity, symbolic thinking, and care for the dead.

Second, the DNA questions raised by these sites — whether or not they have been definitively answered — are questions that illuminate the deep history of all contemporary Native Americans.

The founding populations that spread across the Americas in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene are the biological ancestors, in a population-level sense, of the Indigenous peoples who met European explorers and colonizers.

Understanding those founding populations, and the diversity that emerged from them in the subsequent millennia, is part of understanding the full human history of the continent.