Before the MA-1 analysis, the ancestral history of Native Americans could be told as a story about East Asian populations moving through Beringia into the Americas.

After the MA-1 analysis, that story was replaced by a more complex and more accurate one: a story about the mixing of at least two distinct ancestral components in Asia — East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian — before the Beringian crossing; about the isolation and diversification of the admixed founding population in Beringia; and about the subsequent spread and diversification of that founding population across two continents.

This more complex story is also more human.

It reflects the reality that the founding of the Americas was not a simple event but a long process, involving multiple populations, multiple time periods, and multiple geographic locations across a vast region of Asia.