Not to Europeans.

Not to Polynesians.

Not to the Ainu of Japan, despite the morphological similarities that had fueled speculation for years.

Not to any ancient Eurasian population that had migrated directly to North America thousands of years before the ancestors of modern Native Americans.

His genome showed that he belonged to the same broad ancestral population that gave rise to all Native American peoples — the ancient population that had migrated from northeastern Asia into the Americas during or before the last Ice Age and whose descendants eventually spread across both continents.

More specifically — and this is where the findings became not just scientifically significant but personally, historically, politically profound — the Willerslev team found that Kennewick Man was most closely related to contemporary Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest.

When they compared his genome to those of modern tribal populations, the closest matches were among the tribes of the Columbia Plateau region — the very tribes who had claimed him as their ancestor.

Among the tribal nations that had filed for his repatriation in 1996, the Colville Confederated Tribes showed the strongest genetic affinity with Kennewick Man’s genome.

The tribes had been right.

He was their ancestor.