The 9,000-Year-Old Child’s Tooth Found In An Alaska Cave — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Lost Population Of The First Americans

That her community was here, on the Seward Peninsula, 9,000 years ago.

That their ancestry connected them to the deep human past of Beringia and to the founding of the Americas.

And that the specific genomic signature they carried — the Ancient Beringian ancestry that the DNA of her tooth preserved for nine millennia — showed that a founding lineage of the first Americans was more persistent, more geographically enduring, than researchers had understood before that tooth was retrieved from a collection drawer in 2016 and finally given the analysis it had waited so long to receive.

A tooth.