Its distribution across such a wide geographic range reflects the mobility of Pleistocene and post-glacial human populations and the multiple mixing events that distributed the Ancient North Eurasian genetic signal across different parts of Eurasia and ultimately into the Americas.

In modern Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasian component represents the portion of ancestry that pulls away from the East Asian model and toward something older and more westerly.

It is not “European DNA” in any meaningful or historically useful sense.

The European populations of today also carry Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, inherited from the Bronze Age steppe populations that mixed into European populations roughly five thousand years ago — but the pathway by which Ancient North Eurasian ancestry reached Native Americans was completely separate from the pathway by which it reached modern Europeans, and it predated the European pathway by many thousands of years.

Saying that Native Americans have “European ancestry” because they carry some Ancient North Eurasian heritage, and that modern Europeans also carry some Ancient North Eurasian heritage, is like saying that two cousins are the same person because they share a common ancestor.