The people of the Yucatán did not simply descend in a straight line from Naia and people like her.

They were shaped by the same forces that shaped all human populations over long periods of time: movement and mixing, adaptation and selection, the development of new technologies and new social organizations, the environmental pressures of changing climate and changing resource availability.

The specific history of how the genetic makeup of the Yucatán’s population changed between Naia’s time and the emergence of the complex societies that eventually built the Mayan cities is not fully reconstructed.

Ancient genomic data from the intermediate period — from the Archaic cultures of Mesoamerica, from the early agricultural communities that preceded the Classic Maya — is sparse.