The question of when and how the Americas were first populated has been one of the most contested in all of archaeology and genetics, and the Mal’ta discovery did not resolve it — but it complicated the story in ways that have proven extraordinarily productive.

The broad outlines of the story were already established before the Mal’ta genome was analyzed.

People arrived in the Americas from northeastern Asia.

They crossed into North America via the Bering land bridge — the broad, grassy plain that connected Siberia to Alaska when sea levels were low enough to expose the continental shelf.

They spread southward through the Americas, adapting to radically different environments, eventually reaching the southern tip of South America.

What was debated — and is still debated — is the timing, the number of distinct founding migrations, and the specific population histories that preceded the crossing.