Somewhere in a collection drawer in Copenhagen, a tooth sat waiting.

It was small — the kind of small that means you could close your fingers around it and not feel it.

A deciduous tooth, the sort that a very young child carries in the first years of life before the permanent teeth push through.

This particular tooth was a maxillary central incisor, from the upper front of the jaw.

It had been excavated from a cave on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula in 1949, recorded, packaged, transported across an ocean to Denmark, and then effectively forgotten.

Not deliberately hidden, not lost — just filed away among the vast accumulation of archaeological material that institutions collect and catalog and store, and which often waits years or decades or generations for someone to return with the right question.

For nearly seventy years, nothing much happened with that tooth.

Then, in 2016, a National Park Service archaeologist named Jeff Rasic was working with collections when he came across the specimen.

A small object.

A paper trail reaching back to a Danish excavation on a remote Alaskan peninsula during the decade when Alaska was still a territory and the age of ancient DNA was not even a glimmer on the horizon of the possible.

What happened next changed the understanding of who the first people of the Arctic were, and how long they persisted.

When researchers applied modern ancient-DNA analysis to that single tooth, they found enough genetic material to identify the child’s sex, determine something about her ancestry, and connect her to a broader population history that had been partially illuminated by a different discovery at a different Alaskan site.

The tooth was directly dated by radiocarbon methods and returned an age of 8,085 plus or minus 40 radiocarbon years before present — a number that, when converted to calibrated calendar years, corresponds to roughly 9,000 years ago.

Nine thousand years ago.

A baby’s tooth.

A child of approximately one to one and a half years old at the time of death.

And when the DNA spoke, it identified her as belonging to an ancient population branch — the group researchers call Ancient Beringians — that had been identified just a few years earlier from a different Alaskan site and that was now, through this single tiny tooth, shown to have persisted in Alaska thousands of years longer than previously documented.

The tooth had been waiting the entire time.