It says that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas carry a complex, multi-stranded ancestry — one that includes a connection to the people of Ice Age Siberia, represented by the child at Mal’ta, along with the East Asian ancestral stream and whatever other population histories have contributed to the specific genetic makeup of particular communities over the millennia.

That complexity is itself a form of dignity.

It pushes back against the simplistic narratives that have sometimes characterized discussions of Native American origins — narratives that reduce an extraordinary variety of human communities, with thousands of years of separate history, to a single ancestral event or a single geographic origin.

The truth, as the Mal’ta genome helps to reveal, is more complex, more ancient, and more interesting than any simple story can capture.

The Ethics Of Ancient Remains And Indigenous Voices