It proceeds in accumulating evidence, revised models, and new questions generated by each answer.

The questions that Naia’s remains raised — about morphological variation in early Americans, about the founding of the hemisphere’s populations, about the relationship between skull shape and genetic ancestry — are still being addressed with new data.

Each new ancient genome from the Americas adds a piece to the picture.

Each new morphological study of early American specimens refines the characterization of how skull shapes varied and changed over time.

The broader picture that is emerging from this work is one of a founding population that was probably more diverse than a simple model would suggest — not diverse in the sense of multiple independent founding events, but diverse in the sense that the population entering the Americas from Beringia was itself not homogeneous.