She is, among the oldest Americans whose genome has been analyzed, one of the most important — but her importance derives from what her genome shows, not from the date alone.

The combination of her age (old enough to be informative about the founding period), her location (Alaska, near the Beringian source region), and her genetic profile (basal to other sampled Native American populations) is what makes her remarkable.

Understanding that USR1 existed well after the initial peopling of the Americas is important for interpreting what her genome tells us.

She was not among the very first people in the Americas.

She was a member of a lineage that had already diverged from other lineages some ten thousand years before her birth — a lineage that had maintained its distinct genetic character through the intervening period, in a region where the specific ecology and the specific history of the founding population’s differentiation had allowed that distinctiveness to persist.