The growth of that founding population, over the subsequent millennia, is one of the processes that eventually produced the dense and culturally complex societies of the Northwest Coast at the time of European contact.

The specific dynamics of population growth — how quickly it occurred, what factors limited it, what ecological and social mechanisms regulated it — are questions that require demographic modeling and more archaeological data than are currently available for the early Holocene of the region.

What can be said is that the founding coastal population was small enough that the genetic diversity of the later Northwest Coast peoples reflects a bottleneck — a period of small population size — consistent with the initial colonization of the coast by a founding group.

The genetic similarities among different Northwest Coast peoples — similarities that reflect their shared founding ancestry — are one of the genomic signatures of this founding population dynamics.