The Genome In A Global Context

The USR1 genome did not exist in isolation.

It was one of several major ancient American genomes published in 2018, and it took its meaning partly from how it fit within the growing body of ancient genomic data from across the hemisphere and from northeastern Asia.

The same year that the Moreno-Mayar paper on USR1 appeared in Nature, other research groups published analyses of ancient genomes from various early American sites, from northeastern Asian archaeological contexts, and from the modern genomes of Indigenous American populations sampled with greater depth and breadth than had previously been possible.

The combined picture from this body of research was more complex and more informative than any single paper could have provided.