And now, at last, he rests again, returned to the earth by those who are his own.

EPILOGUE: WHAT CAME AFTER — AND WHAT IS STILL COMING

The story of Kennewick Man did not end with his reburial in 2017.

In science, stories like this never truly end — they transform, they evolve, they open into new chapters.

The ancient DNA techniques that allowed Eske Willerslev’s team to sequence Kennewick Man’s genome have continued to advance at astonishing speed.

In the years since the 2015 paper, the cost of ancient DNA sequencing has fallen dramatically, the methods have become more refined, and the number of ancient American individuals whose genomes have been studied has grown from a handful to several hundred.

The picture that has emerged from this growing body of evidence is one of extraordinary complexity.

The first Americans — the people who crossed from Asia into the New World during the last Ice Age — were not a single, homogeneous group.

They came in waves, or perhaps in a continuous trickle, from different source populations in northeastern Asia.

Some of these groups merged as they moved southward through the Americas; others remained relatively isolated; others were absorbed by later arrivals.