The Bluefish Caves evidence does not simply push the Clovis culture back in time — it suggests that people were in eastern Beringia long before Clovis technology developed, using different tools whose identity is not fully established, in a subsistence and mobility pattern whose relationship to the later Clovis expansion is unknown.

The question of how the Bluefish Caves people — and the broader Beringian population of the Last Glacial Maximum — are related to the later Clovis people is one that neither the archaeological nor the genetic evidence can currently answer with certainty.

The genetic models suggest that all Native Americans descend from a single founding Beringian population, which would make the Bluefish Caves people ancestors of the Clovis people in a broad biological sense.

But the specific cultural and technological traditions of the two groups were clearly different, and the mechanisms by which the Clovis technology developed from whatever toolkit preceded it in the Americas are not yet understood.