This East Asian connection was real and is still recognized.

It reflects a genuine and important part of the ancestral history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The founding population of the Americas clearly had deep roots in the broad population complex of East and northeastern Asia.

But there was a complication.

When researchers performed detailed statistical analyses of modern Native American genomes — looking specifically at which parts of the genome showed the strongest affinity to which reference populations — they kept encountering a component that did not fit cleanly into the East Asian category.

Some portion of Native American ancestry seemed to be pulling toward a different direction, a direction that looked more like ancient western Eurasian ancestry than like East Asian ancestry.