And the people they became, or the people who descended from them, were part of the founding population of the Americas — the ultimate ancestors of the Indigenous peoples who inhabited two continents when European ships arrived five centuries ago.

The child at Mal’ta was not one of those migrants.

He died in Siberia, buried beneath his stone slab, before the Americas were populated.

But his genome — the specific combination of genetic material that was his and that can be partially recovered from his 24,000-year-old bones — tells us something about the population he belonged to and, by extension, about the ancestry of the people who eventually crossed into the Western Hemisphere.

That is what the DNA test revealed.