Each of these haplogroups is found in Asian populations as well as American ones, but the specific subgroups found in the Americas are, in most cases, different from those found in Asia.

The American-specific subgroups — like D1 — developed after the founding population of the Americas became isolated from its Asian relatives, accumulated mutations specific to the isolated population, and diversified into the distinct subgroups over thousands of years.

Finding haplogroup D1 in Naia meant that she was unambiguously part of the founding population of the Americas — the same population ancestral to the historical and modern Indigenous peoples of the hemisphere.

She was not a representative of a separate, earlier founding event.