In 2018, the genome of a baby girl who died in Alaska roughly 11,500 years ago introduced science to a human population nobody knew existed. A few years later, a cancer patient in Nevada watched his own DNA quietly replaced by a stranger’s. Between those two stories lies an uncomfortable truth about the molecule we treat as the ultimate proof of who we are.
A Forested Camp Fifty Miles From Fairbanks
Upward Sun River sits in the Tanana lowlands of interior Alaska, roughly fifty miles from Fairbanks, in country so thickly wooded and boggy that research teams have reached it by helicopter. Anthropologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska began working there in the early 2000s, and the choice was strategic rather than romantic. Interior Alaska once formed part of a vast landmass connecting Siberia to North America, which makes it one of the few places on the continent where the earliest arrivals could plausibly have left traces. Anything preserved there carries outsized weight. What the team uncovered was a residential camp with hearths, stone tool debris and food remains, the ordinary leftovers of people living their lives rather than the monumental ruins that usually draw crowds.