It meant that the history of Native American peoples does not begin with the arrival of Europeans.

It does not begin with the first agriculture.

It does not begin with the Hopewell mound builders or the Mississippian cities or any other later cultural development.

It begins at least 13,000 years ago — and, as other evidence suggests, significantly earlier — with people who were already sophisticated, technologically accomplished, and culturally rich.

The Anzick genome also had implications for the debate about pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas.

While the genome cannot speak directly to what happened before Clovis, the close relationship between the Clovis child and modern Native Americans is consistent with the mainstream model in which Native Americans descend from a founding Beringian population that entered the Americas and expanded — possibly through multiple dispersal events — to fill the continent.