Others have argued that the scientific findings — which so powerfully confirmed the deep American roots of Native peoples and refuted hypotheses that had been used to question those roots — justified the research and served Indigenous interests as well as scientific ones.

These disagreements are genuine and ongoing, and they reflect real and important tensions that the Anzick case did not resolve, though it contributed to the ongoing conversation about how they should be approached.

The Debates That The Genome Did Not Settle

The publication of the Anzick-1 genome in 2014 was a landmark event, but it was not the end of the story.

In the years following the publication, the accumulating body of ancient American genomic data continued to complicate and enrich the picture that the Anzick findings had begun to develop.