In the coverage of this research, several claims have been made that go beyond what the study’s evidence supports.

Clarifying what the study does not say is as important as describing what it does say.

The study does not say that the Checua individuals were a different species.

They were fully anatomically modern human beings — Homo sapiens — whose genomes, for all their divergence from other South American populations, were unmistakably within the range of human genetic diversity.

Population genetics routinely finds distinct lineages within the human species; distinctness at the population level is not the same as biological speciation.

The study does not say that the Checua people had no relatives anywhere in the Americas.