Genomes from populations that diverged later — after the main diversification events — carry the signal of those later divergences on top of the founding diversity.

USR1 carries the founding diversity with less of the subsequent layering.

The combination of these three characteristics — age, location, and genetic position — makes USR1 uniquely informative about the founding of the Americas and about the early history of the continent’s first human populations.

Future research will add more ancient Alaskan and subarctic genomes, filling in the picture of how the ancient population of this region changed over time — how the Ancient Beringian lineage was gradually absorbed or replaced, when the populations ancestral to modern Athabascan communities arrived in the region, and how the specific genetic diversity of modern Indigenous Alaskans relates to the ancient diversity that USR1 represents.

Those future findings will not diminish the importance of USR1.