This raised questions about ancestry and cultural exchange.

Sensational retellings sometimes turned the research into a claim that Ishi was not actually Yahi.

That conclusion goes farther than the evidence allows.

Identity in nineteenth-century Native California cannot be reduced to a laboratory concept of cultural purity.

Communities interacted.

People married across group boundaries.

Refugees joined relatives and neighbors.

Populations devastated by violence had practical and social reasons to form new connections.

If Ishi learned a particular stoneworking technique from someone outside the Yahi community, that fact would tell us about survival networks, not automatically invalidate everything else known about his language and identity.

The debate is valuable for another reason.