The two traditions — European and Siberian — were geographically distant, and the cultural connections between them were not obvious from the archaeological record alone.

The DNA of MA-1 suggested a possible explanation.

If the Ancient North Eurasian population represented by MA-1 was genetically related to some of the populations that contributed to the ancestry of modern western Eurasians — as the research indicates — then the cultural similarity between the Mal’ta figurines and the European Venus figurines might reflect shared cultural ancestry rather than independent invention.

Both traditions might have developed from shared cultural roots in a broadly distributed ancient population, the western representatives of which eventually gave rise partly to modern Europeans, and the eastern representatives of which — the Ancient North Eurasians at Mal’ta — eventually contributed to the founding population of the Americas.