The population that MA-1 represented has been given a specific designation by researchers who study it: Ancient North Eurasians, or ANE.

The term is a label of convenience, not a description of a specific ethnic or cultural group.

Ancient North Eurasians refers to a genetic heritage — a distinctive pattern of genetic markers found in their clearest, most unambiguous form in MA-1 and in a small number of other ancient individuals from Siberia and adjacent regions.

It is a population defined by genetics, not by archaeology or ethnography, because the cultural identities and social structures of the actual people who carried this ancestry are not recoverable from the genetic data alone.

The Ancient North Eurasian genetic pattern is characterized by its position in the human family tree: closer to the common ancestor of western Eurasians and Native Americans than to the common ancestor of East Asians and Native Americans.