It made his age certain, his sex confirmed, his maternal lineage established.

It connected him to the founding genetic diversity of the Americas, to the haplogroup B lineage that runs through Indigenous communities from North America to the tip of South America.

What science could not make visible was the internal experience of a man in a cold, dark, difficult place, more than a thousand feet from daylight, doing something that — based on the physical demands alone — was not casual, not accidental in its overall character, and not easily explained by any framework that does not acknowledge that this person had reasons of his own that we will never fully know.

The bones have been studied.