But it’s also a time for introspection. The technology that allows us to wrest DNA from millennia-old bones has advanced rapidly, but the ethical and cultural dimensions to that work have not. Indigenous groups have had a long and troubled history with genetic science. The Ancient One’s genome, for example, was analyzed against the wishes of Columbia Plateau tribes, who wanted his remains repatriated and reburied. Barack Obama granted that wish in 2016, after a 20-year delay and a bitter dispute. But then, just last year, scientists published a study of remains from Chaco Canyon without consulting any Native peoples.

Many scientists now argue that it is unethical and exploitative to study ancient DNA without consulting with indigenous groups, and ideally before any work is done. “Ancestral remains should be regarded not as ‘artifacts’ but as human relatives who deserve respect,” wrote one group, Raff and Bolnick included, in a recent opinion piece.

Scheib realized this too late. She had come to evolutionary genetics from a career as a comedy writer, and being new in the field, she only caught wind of the ethical debate when she had already analyzed most of her remains. All of them had come from museums, and been classified as “culturally unaffiliated” with any particular tribe. “Today, it’s really not acceptable to get permission just from a museum,” she says. “You need to talk to the communities too, whether the remains are culturally affiliated or not.”

To find out how to proceed, Scheib and her supervisor Toomas Kivisild asked Ripan Malhi for advice. Malhi is an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who approaches indigenous communities before doing any work on ancient remains and establishes a formal memorandum of understanding with them. The tribes are involved in every step of his research from its very conception. “When Freddi and Toomas first got in touch, I was like: You can’t publish that,” he says. “And I thought that was the end of that.”

It wasn’t. In 2016, Scheib started contacting every federally recognized tribe that was potentially connected to the remains she had studied. She explained that she had already done the work, and presented her results. She asked them about their comments and concerns, and about questions they would want to answer in future work. In cases where she couldn’t get express permission from a tribe, she left the data gleaned from the respective samples out of her paper. She shared a draft of that paper with the tribes, and invited them to appear as co-authors. Several agreed. So did Malhi, who was impressed by Scheib’s efforts. “I felt disappointed that I hadn’t known better to do it a different way in the first place,” Scheib says. “But you can’t go back and change time.”

Scheib isn’t planning to do any more research on Native American ancient DNA, unless the tribes she talked to ask her to do something specific. Even then, she’s not sure if she’s the right person to do the work. “I put this to the communities: If you have any young people who are interested in genetics and interested in continuing this work, tell me, and I will find a way of getting them to our lab,” she says.

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