That distinction is historically important and practically meaningful.

It means that the Anzick genome carries the signatures of shared ancestry with a wide range of modern Native American populations — not because he was the ancestor of all of them personally, but because his population had not yet undergone the divergences that would separate the different lineages from each other.

His genome is, in a genomic sense, close to the trunk of the American family tree — before the branches have fully separated.

What The Next Generation Of Research Will Ask