The population genetic analyses that followed — comparing the Mal’ta genome against databases of modern and ancient human genomes from around the world — required sophisticated statistical methods and considerable computational power.

The finding that the Mal’ta genome showed a specific and statistically significant relationship to Native American populations was not obvious from a simple visual inspection of the data; it emerged from the application of population genetic models that could detect the signal of shared ancestry against the background noise of general human relatedness.

The journey from conception, through death and burial, through 24,000 years of cold preservation, through excavation and museum storage, through the development of the laboratory and computational tools needed to read the preserved fragments, to the published finding — this journey is one of the most unlikely in the history of science.

It depended on an improbable combination of circumstances, including the specific preservation conditions of the Siberian burial, the development of ancient DNA technology at exactly the right moment, and the decision by researchers to attempt the analysis on material this old.