What the ice preserved was his physical body, the clothing on that body, the food in his stomach, and the cellular material that carried his genetic information.

These fragments of evidence are extraordinary by the standards of what archaeological investigation usually provides.

They are still only fragments.

The seventeen people whose DNA connected them to him are not experiencing a genetic abstraction.

They are experiencing — or many have described experiencing — something that their own cultural and social frameworks make deeply meaningful: a connection to an ancestor, a man from long ago found in the ice, who turns out to be part of their family in the specific way that family has always been understood in their matrilineal tradition.

That experience belongs to them.