When the Hoyo Negro paper was published in Science in May 2014 — just a few months before the Anzick-1 paper appeared in Nature in the same year — the response from the scientific community was substantial.

The combination of the morphological data (which placed Naia within the range of early American craniometrics that had puzzled researchers) and the genetic data (which confirmed her place within the American founding haplogroup) was exactly the kind of combined evidence that the field needed.

The paper’s authors included the divers who discovered the site, the INAH archaeologists who led the excavation, physical anthropologists who analyzed the skeletal remains, and geneticists who performed the ancient DNA analysis — an unusually broad collaborative group that reflected the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of the Hoyo Negro project.

The specific conclusion that the paper drew — that Naia’s morphological distinctiveness and her genetic affinity with later Native American populations were compatible in a model where both early and later Native Americans derived from the same founding population, with morphological change occurring within that lineage over time — was stated carefully and with appropriate hedging.