If the ancestors of historical Native American peoples had replaced an earlier, different population, then the relationship between contemporary Indigenous communities and the very first Americans was more complex — or, in some interpretations, weaker — than the story of continuous occupation from the founding event would suggest.

The genetic evidence does not support that interpretation.

The founding event — the migration of people from northeastern Asia into the Americas — appears to have been the ancestor of essentially all the Indigenous peoples of the hemisphere, and the physical diversity among early American populations is better explained by processes within that founding lineage than by separate founding events.

The Team That Did The Work

Behind the scientific findings published in 2014, and behind all the subsequent research on the Hoyo Negro site, are the people who did the actual work — the divers who risked their lives to map and document the cave, the archaeologists who managed an excavation under conditions that no textbook had prepared them for, and the scientists who developed and applied the methods that made the genetic analysis possible.