The MA-1 finding has been subject to misrepresentation in both directions, and it is worth being specific about what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Native Americans are “European.” The Ancient North Eurasian ancestry that MA-1 represents is not the same thing as European ancestry.

Modern Europeans carry Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, but they received it through a completely different historical pathway — from Bronze Age steppe populations that moved into Europe roughly five thousand years ago, long after the founding of the Americas.

The Ancient North Eurasian component in Native American genomes arrived through a separate pathway thousands of years earlier.