Not in a vague, poetic, metaphorical sense.

Not in the way that all humans are ultimately related if you go back far enough.

But in a specific, genetically demonstrable, scientifically verified sense: the ancient man found beside the Columbia River was more closely related to the tribes who had lived beside that river — who still lived beside that river — than to any other population on earth.

The skull morphology that had launched a thousand theories, that had fueled racist speculation about European colonization, that had driven a nine-year legal battle and generated a decade of scientific papers and media coverage — that skull morphology had been misleading.

Not because the measurements were wrong.

The measurements were careful and accurate.

But because the measurements were being interpreted through a framework that assumed modern population groups were stable and ancient population groups resembled modern ones.

This assumption was false.

What the ancient DNA revealed was that the ancient peoples of the Americas were more morphologically diverse than their modern descendants — that the skeletal features we associate with specific modern Native American populations developed over thousands of years, and that the earliest inhabitants of North America looked different from their descendants in measurable ways, even though they were their direct genetic ancestors.

The skull of Kennewick Man didn’t look like a modern Native American skull.