The 8,800-Year-Old Man Found 1,000 Feet Inside A Colorado Cave — And The DNA Test That Linked Him To A Native American Founder Lineage

But their geographic and temporal distribution across the Americas in the early Holocene is not yet fully mapped.

Each ancient individual who yields useful mitochondrial or nuclear DNA adds a data point to this map, helping researchers understand where different founding lineages were present at what times and potentially tracing the demographic movements that distributed them across the hemisphere.

The Hourglass Cave man’s haplogroup B sequence, placed in the Colorado Rockies approximately 8,800 years ago, tells us that this founding lineage was present in the high-altitude interior of North America at an early period.

This is a specific and meaningful contribution to the map.