His people were among the early Americans of the continental interior, using Clovis technology to exploit the remaining megafauna and other resources of the post-glacial landscape.

They were not explorers in the European sense — they were not mapping an unknown continent for the first time.

But they or their recent ancestors had been among the first of their population to move into the interior from Beringia, and they were part of a demographic expansion that was transforming the Americas.

The specific genetic relationship between the Anzick population and the somewhat earlier populations that the White Sands footprints imply existed in New Mexico is not yet established — the footprint makers are too old and too geographically distant to be directly connected to Anzick-1 by current evidence.

But if the Beringian standstill model is correct and the Americas were first populated from a single founding population that entered during or after the Last Glacial Maximum, then the White Sands people and the Anzick child were part of the same broad founding lineage, separated by thousands of years of geographic expansion and demographic history.