What this means in practical terms — what the daily life of the Ancient Beringian people looked like, what territory they occupied, how they related to the people who eventually moved south — is not recoverable from a single genome.

But the genetic evidence establishes that the split between USR1’s lineage and the ancestors of other sampled Native American populations occurred before the southward expansion and appears to have maintained a geographic footprint that was distinct from the populations that eventually populated the rest of the hemisphere.

This is Beringia as homeland: not just a place people passed through, but a place where a distinct human population lived for long enough to develop its own genetic character — and where that character was preserved in the genome of a tiny infant buried in a hearth in Alaska eleven and a half thousand years ago.

The First Major Model — And Why It Was Not The End Of The Story