The Anzick burial fit neatly into the Clovis-first framework as it was understood in the late twentieth century.

A child buried with Clovis artifacts in Montana was, under that framework, evidence of the earliest Americans — people who had recently arrived from Asia, were spreading across the continent, were burying their dead with care and ceremony, and were leaving behind the tools that defined their technological tradition.

But even before the DNA analysis of the Anzick child transformed the debate, the Clovis-first model had been coming under sustained pressure from archaeological evidence that did not fit it.

The most significant challenge came from Monte Verde in southern Chile — a site excavated by Tom Dillehay and his colleagues and eventually accepted, after years of controversy, as genuinely older than Clovis.