The 2018 paper was not the end of the inquiry into who the first Americans were.

It was one of the most important turning points in that inquiry — a moment when a new kind of evidence, from an ancient infant’s bones, fundamentally changed the picture.

That picture is still being drawn.

USR1’s contribution to it is permanent.

Whatever revisions future research brings, the discovery that the founding population of the Americas included a branch as ancient and as basal as the Ancient Beringian lineage — a branch discovered in a baby in a hearth in Alaska — will remain part of the scientific record.

It will remain part of the story of the first Americans.

And it will remain, at its core, the story of a very small person who was loved, and buried, and kept, and found.

Eleven and a half thousand years later.

In Alaska.

At the edge of where the first Americans began.