It was built on the foundation that the Windover paper, among other early studies, helped establish, but it used tools that simply did not exist when the Nature paper was written.

This means that statements in popular accounts of Windover to the effect that the DNA “revealed” this or that specific fact about the population history of early Americans need to be understood in context.

The 1986 paper demonstrated that ancient DNA could be recovered from wet-site tissue — a methodological advance.

The later analyses, using more sophisticated techniques, produced haplogroup information but not full genomic data.

The picture has been building incrementally, as it always does in science, rather than being delivered in a single revelatory moment.