Its summers are hot.

The DNA preservation potential for ancient skeletal remains in Texas open sites is generally poor.

The specific question of whether DNA has been successfully extracted from Bering Sinkhole specimens — which had the advantage of the underground environment — is not definitively resolved in the published scientific literature in the same way that analyses of colder-region finds have been.

But the broader ancient DNA picture of early North America, assembled from dozens of successfully analyzed ancient individuals from across the hemisphere, provides a context into which the Texas populations can be placed — even when their own DNA has not been directly studied.

And that picture has become one of the most fascinating and contested areas of modern science.