The Ancient North Siberians of Yana, it turns out, may represent an earlier and more northerly expression of the same broad phenomenon.

The ANS genome, like the Ancient North Eurasians represented by Mal’ta, shows a component of Western Eurasian-related ancestry that connects the deep history of these Siberian populations to the distant populations of Europe and western Asia.

The population movements and admixtures that produced the genetic mosaic visible in the ancestral Native American founding population may have begun far earlier than the migration into the Americas itself — in Siberia, in the Pleistocene, in communities like the one at Yana.

In this sense, the children at Yana were not ancestors of Native Americans in a direct genealogical sense.