The founding of the Americas was a complex process involving multiple genetic components, thousands of years of population history, and the development of hundreds of distinct cultural traditions that cannot be reduced to any single ancestral event or ancestral population.

The specific cultural identities of contemporary Native American nations are the products of their own histories, stretching over thousands of years of separate development on two continents.

But the discovery adds depth to those identities — adds a layer of ancestral connection that was genuinely unknown before 2013.

The people who eventually populated the Americas carried, along with their East Asian ancestry, a thread of genetic heritage that traced back to the people of Ice Age Siberia — to the makers of the Mal’ta figurines, to the community that buried their dead with elaborate care, to the child whose genome became a key to understanding the founding of a hemisphere.

That thread is part of the inheritance of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.