Under this model, the population represented by Anzick-1 was more directly ancestral to the populations that eventually populated Central and South America, while a separate population — sharing common ancestry with Anzick-1’s group but having diverged from it — gave rise to many of the Indigenous peoples of northern North America.

This was a nuanced and important finding, and it is one that has been refined by subsequent research.

The basic point — that the earliest Americans do not represent a single undifferentiated founding population but rather a more complex pattern of divergence and migration — has been consistently supported by the growing body of ancient American genomic evidence.

What The Blood Could Not Say

It is important, in reading the Anzick-1 findings, to understand both what the genome revealed and what it did not — and cannot — reveal.