In PCA, individuals with similar genetic profiles cluster together, while those with different profiles are separated by distance.

The result is a map of genetic space — not geographic space — in which ancient individuals can be placed relative to modern populations.

NUE001 clustered most closely with present-day people from North Africa and West Asia.

He plotted in the genetic space between modern North Africans and modern West Asians, consistent with an ancestry that mixed elements from both broad geographic regions.

This broad pattern was then refined using formal ancestry modeling — specifically a method called qpAdm, which attempts to find the combination of source populations that best explains the ancestry of a target individual.