The demographic modeling associated with the USR1 analysis supports a picture consistent with the standstill hypothesis.

The estimated date of divergence between the Ancient Beringian lineage and the ancestors of other Native American populations — around 20,000 years ago — is consistent with a split that occurred during the standstill period, before the southward expansion that would eventually populate the rest of the hemisphere.

The simplest interpretation — the one that the 2018 paper proposed and that subsequent research has generally supported — is that the founding population of the Americas was present in Beringia during the glacial maximum, and that during this period, the population began to differentiate into at least two subgroups.

One subgroup — the one that USR1 belonged to — remained in or near Beringia and eventually populated parts of Alaska and possibly adjacent areas.