The Ancient Beringians were found in the interior of Alaska.

The proto-First Americans’ southward expansion produced populations distributed across the entire hemisphere.

A model in which the ancient Beringians occupied the interior while the proto-First Americans followed the coast to the south has a geographic logic that the genetics and the archaeology both support.

If this model is correct, the USR1 infant is the representative of a lineage that stayed behind — the people who remained in the Beringian interior while others followed the coast southward and populated the rest of the hemisphere.

That framing is evocative, but it should be held lightly: the specific behavioral and geographic patterns of the divergence are not established, only the genetic pattern of the divergence itself.