But because it reveals that the founding population of the Americas was more diverse, its internal structure more complex, its early history richer and more differentiated, than the models of the twentieth century allowed.

The first Americans were not a monolith.

They were a diverse founding population, carrying within themselves the seeds of the biological diversity that would eventually produce the hundreds of distinct Native nations of the hemisphere.

USR1 — the Ancient Beringian infant from Upward Sun River — is the oldest and deepest window into that founding diversity that we have been able to read.

She was Native American.