It means that the existing models were incomplete — that they had not captured an important component of the reality they were trying to describe.

And the response to that incompleteness was not to dismiss the finding but to work out its implications: what was the Ancient North Eurasian population?

Where did it come from?

How did its genetic heritage find its way into the founding population of the Americas?

What does its presence in the Mal’ta genome, and in more diluted form in modern Native American genomes, tell us about the population history of Ice Age Asia?

These are the questions that the discovery opened, and they have been driving research in ancient genomics ever since.