The “something else” that population genetic analyses had been detecting in Native American genomes, without being able to identify its source, finally had a face.

The source was people like the child buried at Mal’ta, whose population had been present in Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum and whose genetic heritage had eventually contributed to the founding mixture of the Americas.

That clarification was valuable beyond the technical details of the population genetics.

It was a demonstration that the deep past of human populations, even at the scale of the Last Glacial Maximum and the founding of the Americas, could be made legible through the analysis of ancient genomes.

The limits of the achievable were pushed back by the MA-1 result, and subsequent ancient DNA research has been pushing them further ever since.