On one level, the debate is about which specific model best explains the observed genetic signals.

That is a technical question with technical answers, amenable in principle to resolution as more data becomes available.

But at a deeper level, the debate touches on questions about how we tell the story of the first Americans — about which frameworks we use to organize that story, whose interests those frameworks serve, and what is at stake in getting the story right or wrong.

The question “who were the first Americans?” has been asked for a very long time, and the answers to it have sometimes served purposes that had nothing to do with historical truth.