The Ancient North Eurasian component — the one that the Mal’ta boy represented — came from populations in Siberia and adjacent areas whose genetic heritage was more westerly and more ancient in some of its roots.

These two genetic streams mixed, somewhere in northeastern Asia, at some point before or during the peopling of the Americas.

The mixed population — the group that carried both the East Asian and the Ancient North Eurasian components — eventually crossed into the Americas, where its descendants diversified over thousands of years into the hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations that inhabited the hemisphere at the time of European contact.

The Beringian crossing itself — the movement of people from northeastern Asia into North America — probably did not happen in a single mass migration at a single moment.