The 12,000-Year-Old Girl Found Deep Inside A Flooded Cave — And The DNA Discovery That Changed The Story Of The First Americans

The Second Opening: What One Haplogroup Can And Cannot Prove

The Hoyo Negro paper was, in the scientific press and in popular coverage, presented primarily as a resolution of the morphological puzzle — as the finding that proved continuity between early and later American populations.

And it was, in the qualified sense in which scientific papers can prove things, exactly that.

But somewhere in the middle of understanding what the paper achieved, a different and larger question begins to assert itself.

The haplogroup D1 result told us something important about Naia’s maternal lineage.