The founding people of the Northwest Coast brought with them the maritime knowledge and technology that allowed them to adapt to the coastal environment of the Alexander Archipelago.

That knowledge and technology had roots in the northeastern Asian maritime cultures from which the Beringian founding population derived.

The specific connections between Northwest Coast cultural traditions and their Beringian or northeastern Asian precursors are difficult to establish from the current evidence base, partly because so much of the evidence for the Beringian world itself is now submerged beneath the Bering Sea.

But the general connection — the ancestral relationship between the Northwest Coast founding people and the maritime peoples of northeastern Asia — is established by the genomic evidence and provides a broader Pacific context for understanding how the Northwest Coast traditions developed.