The 12,000-Year-Old Girl Found Deep Inside A Flooded Cave — And The DNA Discovery That Changed The Story Of The First Americans
She was not descended from a population that had arrived in the Americas via a different route from a different Asian source.
She was part of the same deep American lineage.
This finding, combined with the morphological data from her skull, had a specific implication.
If Naia was genetically continuous with later Native American populations — if she carried a mitochondrial haplogroup that was part of the same founding population lineage — and if her skull morphology was nevertheless different from those of later Native Americans, then the morphological difference had to be explained within a single continuous population.
There was no need to invoke a separate founding event.