What is now well-established, thanks to the Mal’ta discovery and subsequent research, is that the founding of the Americas involved at least two major genetic components — East Asian ancestry and Ancient North Eurasian ancestry — mixed in proportions that varied across different founding populations.

This is a more complex picture than the simple East Asian migration model, and it requires more sophisticated explanations of how the mixing occurred and when.

The complexity is not a problem.

It is a better reflection of the actual complexity of Pleistocene human population history — the reality that people moved, mixed, and adapted in ways that do not reduce to simple geographic categories.

The Other Ancient Siberians