The morphological debate has not been fully resolved, but the weight of the genetic evidence has shifted the scientific consensus substantially toward the continuity model.

The skull shapes of the earliest Americans appear, on the current evidence, to reflect variation within a single founding population rather than the signature of multiple founding events.

What drove the morphological change over time — selection, diet, drift, development — remains an active research question, but the existence of two separate founding populations is much less well-supported than it appeared to be before the ancient genomic data became available.

This is a significant scientific development, and it matters beyond the narrow technical debate for a straightforward reason: the two-population model had implications for how the history of Indigenous peoples in the Americas was understood.