The mystery is real and important.

And the person at the center of both is real — irreducibly, undeniably, fully, and finally, human.

Finding The Right Comparison Points

The Hourglass Cave man does not stand alone in the ancient DNA record of North America.

By the time his mitochondrial DNA was published in 1996, several other ancient individuals from the Americas had yielded genetic data, and the picture was growing.

Placing him appropriately among these contemporaries — without losing the specificity of his own story — helps establish what his particular contribution to the record was.