Estimates of this kind are highly uncertain, but they suggest a founding population of perhaps a few thousand individuals, distributed across the broad landscape of Beringia during the standstill period.

A few thousand people distributed across a landscape the size of a large country, over a period of several thousand years, is not a single group in any sociological sense.

It is many groups, in regular or occasional contact with each other, differentiated into local bands with their own knowledge of specific territories and their own cultural adaptations to specific ecological conditions.

The genetic differentiation that produced the distinction between the Ancient Beringian lineage and the proto-First American lineage probably reflected a specific geographic and demographic configuration within this broader population — a configuration that the current evidence can describe only in the roughest outlines.