This context — the comparison of the Hourglass Cave man’s mitochondrial sequence against the sequences of other ancient individuals and modern populations — is where the full significance of the genetic finding becomes apparent.

He is not simply a curiosity from a Colorado cave.

He is a data point in the evidence for when and how the maternal-line diversity of the Americas was established, and how it was distributed across the continent in the early Holocene.

Among The Earliest Americans

When researchers began to compile a picture of the ancient genetic record of the Americas in the mid-1990s and into the 2000s, the Hourglass Cave man was among a small but growing number of ancient individuals who had yielded useful mitochondrial DNA.

The early ancient DNA record of the Americas was built from individuals like these: the Spirit Cave Mummy from Nevada, dated to approximately 10,600 calibrated years and carrying haplogroup X; the Anzick individual from Montana, dated to approximately 12,600 years and associated with Clovis technology; the Kennewick Man from Washington State, dated to approximately 8,500 years and the subject of a famous legal dispute over repatriation; and several individuals from South American sites, including the early inhabitants of the Lagoa Santa region in Brazil.