The Man Found In A Melting Glacier — And The DNA Test That Found 17 Living Relatives Centuries Later

There is a simplified version of the Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi story that circulates in some popular accounts.

It goes something like this: hunters found an ancient person preserved in a glacier, scientists did DNA tests, and found his living descendants, proving that Indigenous people have been in the region for thousands of years.

Almost everything in this simplified version is either wrong or misleading.

He was not ancient in the sense of being thousands of years old.

He lived several centuries ago — three to five and a half centuries at most, in the current best understanding.