The Reveal — A Population That Was Not Supposed To Exist

When the Yana genomes were compared to the reference dataset of modern and ancient human populations, the result was clear and startling: these two children did not cluster with any known population.

They were genetically distinct from all the reference populations in ways that could not be explained by normal variation within known groups.

They were something new.

The research team identified and characterized what they were seeing, looking at the full set of genetic markers that indicate population relationships: which variants in the genome were shared with which other populations, at what frequencies, across what genomic regions.

The analysis pointed consistently to the same conclusion: the children at Yana belonged to a population that had diverged from other human populations and developed its own genetic identity in relative isolation.