The Anzick genome is not the genome of a person with European ancestry or African ancestry or any other genetic background that would be consistent with alternative models of American settlement that have sometimes been proposed.

The genetic results from the Anzick genome were, in effect, a comprehensive confirmation of the mainstream scientific model of the Americas’ first peopling: people from northeastern Asia, moving into the Americas through Beringia, spreading rapidly across the continent, and eventually giving rise to all Native American populations.

The Beringian Standstill and the Clovis Connection

The Anzick genome’s evidence for the origin of Clovis people needs to be situated in the context of one of the most important models in the study of the first Americans: the Beringian standstill hypothesis.

As described in the context of Bluefish Caves and other early sites, the Beringian standstill hypothesis proposes that the ancestral Native American population spent an extended period of isolation in the Beringia region — the land bridge between Asia and North America, now largely submerged beneath the Bering Sea — before dispersing into the Americas.