The specific ecological communities that characterized the high country around the cave in the early Holocene — the mix of plants, animals, and environmental conditions — have been replaced by the modern communities that visitors to Eagle County encounter today.

The human landscape has changed even more dramatically.

The small, mobile communities of early Holocene hunter-gatherers who occupied the Rocky Mountain region — communities like the one the Hourglass Cave man belonged to — were replaced, over millennia, by more complex and more sedentary societies.

The specific cultural traditions and population movements that shaped the historic Native American communities of the Colorado region are themselves the product of thousands of years of development, migration, cultural change, and demographic transformation after the time of the Hourglass Cave man.

The Southern Ute people, who have the most direct historical and cultural connection to the Eagle County region in the modern period and who were involved in consultation about the Hourglass Cave remains, are a living community with their own history, their own cultural traditions, and their own understanding of their relationship to the landscape.