The genomic analysis of the Anzick child produced results that were scientifically extraordinary and that had direct implications for the most fundamental debates about the peopling of the Americas.

The most immediately important finding was the child’s relationship to living Native American populations.

The Anzick genome showed clear genetic affinity with Native American peoples across both North and South America — far closer affinity than with any other population anywhere in the world.

This finding established definitively that Clovis people were not a separate, extinct population without modern descendants, but were instead the direct ancestors of the Native Americans who continue to live in the Americas today.

This result had implications for a debate that had sometimes intersected with the Clovis evidence: the question of whether there had been pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas who had been replaced by the Clovis expansion without leaving modern descendants.