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

But even cave preservation is imperfect.

The Trail Creek tooth survived 9,000 years in a cave on the Seward Peninsula.

Whatever skeletal material accompanied it when the child died — if any reached the cave at all — apparently did not survive.

One tooth is what remains.

The sparseness of the human-remains record from the early Arctic has practical consequences for the kinds of scientific questions that can be answered.

Population genetics, paleodiet analysis, paleopathology, the study of developmental stress and health — all of these lines of analysis require physical material.