The popular translation — Australians reached South America — is both wrong and potentially harmful, because it misrepresents both the genetic science and the history of the Indigenous peoples involved.

What the Ancient Lagoa Santa Genomes Showed

The application of ancient DNA analysis to skeletal material from Lagoa Santa itself produced one of the most important contributions to the Population Y debate.

If the Population Y signal was real and if it reflected a distinct ancestral component in early South Americans, then the ancient people of Lagoa Santa — among the earliest known South Americans — should show that signal in their own genomes.

The results were, as is so often the case with complex scientific questions, more nuanced than a simple confirmation or refutation would have been.