Arlington Springs does not exist in isolation in the record of early Americans.

It must be understood alongside a set of other discoveries that together form the current picture of terminal Pleistocene North America.

The Anzick Child, a male infant buried approximately 12,600 calibrated years ago in Montana with Clovis artifacts and ochre, provided the first ancient genome from a Clovis-associated individual.

The genetic analysis placed him on the lineage ancestral to most modern Indigenous people of the Americas — demonstrating that at least some Clovis people were the biological ancestors of later Native American populations.

The Anzick burial was associated with genuine Clovis technology: the fluted points and other distinctive Clovis artifacts that define the complex.