Preserved until a laboratory in the 1990s could extract them and read the sequence and establish that this man was part of the founding maternal diversity of all the Native peoples of the Americas.

He was real.

He was a person with a specific life history, specific relationships, specific knowledge, specific beliefs.

He was not a specimen and not a data point.

He was a man who carried a torch into the dark and did not come back out, and whose bones eventually told us some of what science is capable of telling — and left untold what science cannot reach.

His DNA connects him to millions of living people.