He did not know that a team of Danish scientists would one day extract fragments of his DNA from his bones and tell the world who he was related to.

He did not know any of this.

He was just a man, living a life, in a world that is gone now except in the traces it left behind.

His bones are back in the ground now.

His DNA has been mapped.

His story has been told, in courtrooms and laboratories and newspapers and now, here, in this article.

But he himself — the person he was, the thoughts he had, the people he loved, the life he lived — those things are gone.

Lost in the eight thousand years between his death and the Sunday afternoon when two young men wading into the Columbia River found his skull in the shallows.

What we have are the traces he left behind.

And the living descendants who stand in relationship to him across those eighty-four centuries.