The ancient genomic data also began to address questions about specific population divergences.

When did the ancestors of North American and South American populations separate?

When did the populations ancestral to the Indigenous peoples of different parts of the hemisphere begin to differentiate?

The dates that emerged from these analyses were important: the deep divergences between some North and South American populations appeared to have occurred approximately 13,000 to 15,000 years ago — consistent with a founding population that entered the Americas before or during the early part of the period in which Clovis technology appeared, and that then began to diversify rapidly as people spread southward and into different environments.

The precise timing and geography of these divergences remains an active research area.