One of the most underappreciated aspects of the Bluefish Caves evidence is its relevance to the question of how people reached South America — a question that is, geographically, very far from a Yukon cave.

The chain of inference is this: if people were in eastern Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum — as the Bluefish Caves evidence suggests — then there was a human population in the region from which all later Native American populations ultimately derived.

That population, when the routes into the ice-free parts of North America eventually opened, was positioned to disperse southward.

Its descendants would have moved through North America and eventually into South America, reaching the tip of the continent by approximately 14,500 years ago based on the Monte Verde evidence.