Paleoindians buried Spirit Cave Man in a Nevada cave, and archaeologists excavated these remains in 1940. Radiocarbon testing in 1996 dated the burial and associated grave goods as older than 10,700 years. Living just 10 miles from Spirit Cave, the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe filed a NAGPRA claim in 1997 requesting the repatriation of the Spirit Cave ancestor they call “The Storyteller.” This claim ignited a 20-year legal dispute that led the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe to make the gut-wrenching decision to permit DNA testing. This article documents a 10,000-year genetic continuity firmly linking Paleoindians at Spirit Cave to the Lovelock culture and that strongly suggests continuities to modern Paiutes living there today with no population replacement. We explore the associated radiocarbon record of these dynamics to understand the syncopated population movements that responded to shifting resource distributions. Resilience theory provides an operational way to understand this extraordinary continuity through key concepts, including tipping points, early warning signals, sunk-cost effects, and loss-of-resilience hypotheses. The Spirit Cave case also underscores the moribund concepts and assumptions underlying a century of Great Basin anthropological study that misread this long-term episode of Indigenous resilience and survivance.

古印第安人将 Spirit Cave Man 埋在内华达州的一个洞穴中，考古学家于 1940 年挖掘了这些遗迹。1996 年的放射性碳测试表明，墓葬和相关陪葬品的历史超过 10,700 年。居住在距离 Spirit Cave 仅 10 英里的 Fallon Paiute-Shoshone 部落于 1997 年提交了 NAGPRA 索赔，要求遣返他们称之为“讲故事的人”的 Spirit Cave 祖先。这一说法引发了一场长达 20 年的法律纠纷，导致 Fallon Paiute-Shoshone 部落做出了允许 DNA 测试的令人痛心的决定。这篇文章记录了 10,000 年的遗传连续性，将 Spirit Cave 的古印第安人与 Lovelock 文化紧密联系起来，这强烈表明今天生活在那里的现代派尤特人没有人口替代的连续性。我们探索了这些动态的相关放射性碳记录，以了解响应资源分布变化的切分频人口运动。弹性理论提供了一种通过关键概念（包括临界点、早期预警信号、沉没成本效应和弹性丧失假设）来理解这种非凡连续性的可作方法。Spirit Cave 案还凸显了一个世纪以来大盆地人类学研究所背后奄奄一息的概念和假设，这些研究误读了土著复原力和生存的这一长期事件。