This finding was, in a sense, expected.

The hypothesis that the Americas were populated by people who moved from Asia through Beringia is the best-supported model of American settlement, supported by genetic evidence from living Native American populations, by linguistic evidence, by the archaeological record, and by the basic geographic logic of how the Americas could have been reached from the Old World during the period when sea levels were low enough to expose a land connection.

What was not expected — or at least not clearly anticipated — was what happened when the ancient South American genomes were compared in detail to the genomes of populations from different parts of the world, and specifically when certain statistical analyses were applied to detect patterns of shared ancestry.

What “Allele Sharing” Actually Means