It has been diluted and mixed everywhere it occurs — in Native American populations, where it appears mixed with East Asian ancestry; in some modern Siberian populations, where it appears mixed with more recent East Asian and Central Asian ancestry; and in some modern European populations, where it appears as a minor component mixed with the ancestry of Neolithic farmers from the Near East and the hunter-gatherers of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

The child at Mal’ta represents the clearest, most temporally precise window into this ancestry — the clearest expression of what the Ancient North Eurasian genetic heritage looked like before the mixing that followed the Last Glacial Maximum.

He is, in this sense, a genetic baseline: a reference point against which the mixed ancestries of later populations can be measured and understood.

The Layers Of The Story