She is, in this specific statistical sense, as close to the root of the Native American family tree as we have been able to directly observe.

What The Name Ancient Beringian Carries — And What It Doesn’t

The label Ancient Beringian is a scientific term, coined for a specific purpose in the context of a specific population genetic analysis.

It is worth examining what the name carries and what it does not, because names have a way of taking on lives of their own — of being used in contexts that extend beyond their original technical meaning.

In the 2018 paper, Ancient Beringian refers specifically to the genetic lineage represented by USR1 — a lineage that is basal to other sampled Native American populations and that, based on demographic modeling, diverged from the ancestors of other Native Americans approximately 20,000 years ago in the Beringian region.