The founding population of the Americas was the ancestor of all sampled Native American populations, including the Ancient Beringians.

There is no genetic evidence of a separate, non-Native founding group that preceded the Native American founders.

But the implications of the findings go deeper than the refutation of specific hypotheses.

They speak to the question of what it means to know where you come from — and of the relationship between scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge about that question.

The Athabascan communities with traditional territory at Upward Sun River know where they come from.

They know it through their oral traditions, through their ceremonial practices, through their ecological knowledge of the landscape they have inhabited for as long as memory reaches, and through the specific cultural forms — language, kinship systems, spiritual practices — that connect them to their ancestors.