They were not a specific historical people in the sense of a named, self-identified community with a particular cultural tradition.

The distinction is between a scientific inference and a historical reality — and both can be true simultaneously without contradiction.

Later Genomes And Refinements

The 2018 USR1 paper was not the last word on the Ancient Beringian lineage or on the founding of the Americas.

In the years since its publication, the accumulating body of ancient American genomic data has refined, complicated, and in some cases revised aspects of the picture that the Moreno-Mayar paper proposed.

One of the most significant developments has been the analysis of ancient genomes from other early American sites, which has added additional data points for modeling the early diversification of the founding population.