Some of the researchers who argued for the two-population model of early American peopling were working in good faith with what they believed was genuine scientific evidence.

Others were, in the view of their critics, giving new life to frameworks that had previously served racist purposes.

And some critics of the morphological arguments were themselves motivated partly by a desire to protect Indigenous claims to the hemisphere from findings that could be weaponized against those claims.

The Hoyo Negro findings — and the broader ancient genomic evidence that has accumulated since — cut through this tangle by providing a different kind of evidence entirely.

DNA is not a skull measurement.