The Upward Sun River project was conducted within a framework that, by the standards of its time, represented genuine engagement with these questions.

Whether that framework was sufficient, or whether more could and should have been done, is a judgment that belongs partly to the communities most directly affected.

What the research community can say is that the findings from USR1 have been communicated publicly in ways that have been broadly welcomed by many Indigenous scholars and community members, partly because those findings specifically undercut the kinds of claims about multiple founding populations and non-Native early Americans that have sometimes been used to complicate Indigenous rights arguments.

Why Eleven Thousand Years Is Not The Oldest