But they lack the specific shared genetic signatures that would tie them to any particular later branch of South American population history.

To put it another way: they were ancient South Americans, part of the same broad family as all other Native Americans.

But they were a branch of that family that split off early, before the differentiation that produced the specific ancestral patterns visible in later Andean, Amazonian, or southern-cone populations.

They were not genetically unrelated to other Native Americans — they were related in a deep, early way, like a distant cousin who shares great-great-grandparents but whose family has been on a separate path since before any living person can remember.

This is why it is wrong to say the Checua people were “not Native American” or “had no relatives in the Americas.” Their ancestry traces back to the same founding migrations that gave rise to all other Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.