Archaeological associations between human remains and artifact assemblages are always potentially complex, especially in sites with multiple occupation horizons.

But the tools and the burial are from the same general period, and the most reasonable interpretation is that the people who made and used the Denali Complex tools were the same people who buried their infants in the hearths of their camps.

If that interpretation is correct, then the Ancient Beringian lineage — at least the branch represented by USR1 — was associated with the Denali technological tradition.

The people who carried the deepest-sampled ancestral signal in the Native American family tree were making microblades and using them in composite tools to hunt and process game in the subarctic interior of Alaska.