The 14 to 38 percent.

This range — the estimated proportion of modern Native American ancestry that derives from lineages related to the Mal’ta population — represents, in genomic terms, a substantial contribution.

In a genome of roughly three billion base pairs, 14 percent is 420 million base pairs, 38 percent is more than 1.1 billion.

The actual ancestry relationship is more complex than this simple arithmetic — ancestry works through probabilities and population-level patterns, not through cleanly apportioned sections of the genome — but the scale of the contribution is real.

Approximately one-seventh to more than one-third of the ancestral history of the founding population of the Americas traces back to people like the child at Mal’ta.