The Inheritance We Did Not Know We Had

For the Indigenous peoples of the Americas — for the descendants of the founding population that crossed from Siberia into the Western Hemisphere — the Mal’ta discovery is not simply a scientific finding.

It is a revelation about depth.

It says that their ancestry extends further back, and is more complex, than a straightforward story about a single migration from East Asia would suggest.

It says that among the many threads of ancestry they carry, there is one that traces back to the people of the Siberian Pleistocene — people who made ivory figurines, who buried their dead with elaborate grave goods, who survived in one of the most demanding environments on earth during the coldest period of the last ice age.