They did not preserve the knowledge he had accumulated over forty years of life in a demanding environment — the specific knowledge of plants, animals, weather, terrain, and social relationships that would have been his most valuable possessions.

The DNA said something about his maternal lineage — that it belonged to one of the founding haplogroups of the Americas, that it was closely related to the haplogroup B lineages found in contemporary Native American populations.

But it did not say what specific language his community spoke, what specific cultural traditions they maintained, or what they called themselves.

These absences are not failures of the science.

They are the genuine limits of what physical evidence, analyzed by the best available methods, can recover from the deep past.