These were people who lived in the interior of Siberia and adjacent areas during the last glacial period and into the early post-glacial period.

They were part of the human world of the Pleistocene — hunters adapted to cold, open landscapes, makers of the kind of elaborate material culture documented at Mal’ta.

And they had a genetic heritage that, while connected to the broader web of Eurasian human ancestry, was distinctive enough to be identified as a separate signal in population genetic analyses.

What was striking about the Ancient North Eurasian genetic signal was not just its presence in Mal’ta — it was its presence, in modified and diluted form, in the genomes of contemporary Native Americans.

The implication was significant: somewhere in the ancestry of the founding population of the Americas, Ancient North Eurasian people had contributed genetic material.