That history is the history that actually made Native American communities what they are, and it vastly exceeds in complexity and cultural richness anything that a single ancient genome can represent.

These qualifications are not meant to diminish the finding.

They are meant to situate it accurately within the larger story of which it is a part.

The larger story is this: the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inheritors of a deep and complex ancestral history that extends from Africa through Asia to the Americas, shaped by tens of thousands of years of human migration, population mixing, and adaptation to extraordinarily diverse environments.

The Ancient North Eurasian component identified through MA-1 is one thread in this history — a thread that connects the founding population of the Americas to the people who lived near Lake Baikal 24,000 years ago.