What It Means For A Population To Be Lost

The Ancient North Siberians are described, in the coverage of the 2019 study and in the study itself, as a “lost” or previously unknown population.

This framing deserves exploration, because it carries implications that are easy to misread.

To say that the Ancient North Siberians are a lost population is not to say that they all died without descendants.

It is to say something more specific and more interesting: their distinct genetic identity — the particular combination of genetic variants that made them recognizable as a population separate from their contemporaries — has not persisted in any clearly identifiable modern population.

They were genetically absorbed into later populations, mixed into other lineages, their distinct signature diluted over thousands of years of subsequent demographic history.