The process of populating an entire hemisphere — two enormous continents with every kind of terrain and climate and ecological community — was not a single event or even a series of discrete events but a continuous process of movement, adaptation, and diversification that played out over thousands of years.

The people who walked the shores of Lake Otero 23,000 years ago were not the end of a story about migration.

They were part of a story about how people live and move and adapt that has no single beginning and no single endpoint.

The genetic evidence from Indigenous peoples of the Americas, compiled over the past two decades through studies of both ancient and modern DNA, supports a picture of complex history.

There appear to have been multiple founding populations — groups with distinct genetic signatures that diverged from each other at different points in the process of spreading through the hemisphere.

The relationships between those founding populations and the specific times and routes of their movements are still being worked out, and the publication of each new ancient genome contributes something to the picture while usually complicating the picture at the same time.