He lived and died in Siberia, thousands of miles and thousands of years from the moment when the ancestors of Native Americans made their way into the Western Hemisphere.

The Ancient North Eurasian ancestry that he represents did not travel to the Americas in the form of a specific, identified group of people who packed up their mammoth-bone shelters and walked east.

What happened, instead, was a process of population mixture that occurred somewhere in the complex genetic landscape of Pleistocene and post-glacial Asia.

The people who eventually gave rise to the founding population of the Americas were not a simple, discrete group — they were the result of mixture between populations that had lived in different parts of Asia and had maintained different genetic heritages through the last glacial period.

The East Asian ancestry component of Native Americans — the component that had been recognized before the Mal’ta discovery — came from populations in eastern Asia whose genetic heritage was more closely connected to what we see in modern East Asian populations.