The 24,000-Year-Old Boy Buried Beneath A Stone Slab With 120 Beads And Mammoth-Ivory Jewelry — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Hidden Source Of Native American Ancestry

It worked.

And what it revealed changed the scientific understanding of how the Americas were populated.

The Debate That The Mal’ta Discovery Enriched

The discovery of the Mal’ta genome did not end the debate about the peopling of the Americas.

In many ways, it intensified and enriched the debate by introducing a new element that had to be incorporated into existing models.

Before the Mal’ta discovery, the dominant models for the founding of the Americas posited a founding population derived primarily from East Asian ancestry — people whose genetic profile resembled modern East Asians more than any other contemporary population.