It is an expansion of the story’s depth — a revelation that the founding of the Americas was built from multiple genetic streams, each with its own deep history, each connecting to the broader tapestry of Pleistocene human population history.

The Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, as represented by the Mal’ta boy’s genome, extends that tapestry backward by tens of thousands of years beyond what was previously clearly mapped.

It says that the people who eventually populated the Americas were not simply East Asians who walked across a land bridge.

They were the children of a mixing that had been occurring in Ice Age Asia for thousands of years — a mixing that brought together the genetic heritages of multiple Pleistocene populations, creating the founding stock from which the hemisphere’s original peoples emerged.

The child under the stone is part of that story.