That is genuine scientific progress, even if it does not feel like it from the outside.

The question has been transformed from “did a completely separate, non-Native American population reach South America?” — a question the evidence has answered, with a clear no — to “what specific ancestral structure within the founding Native American population produced the observed pattern of allele sharing?” — a question that requires more data and more refined methods to answer, and that researchers are actively working to address.

The Polynesian Question and Why It Is Different

Because the Population Y discussion involves genetic affinities between South American populations and Pacific populations, it sometimes gets conflated with a related but distinct question: the documented pre-Columbian contact between Polynesian peoples and Native Americans that has been established by genetic evidence from sweet potato dispersal, from chicken bones in archaeological sites, and most recently from genomic analysis of living Native American populations.