The haplogroup B result, while it placed the Hourglass Cave man clearly within the Native American founding haplogroup framework, was not without interpretive complexity.

Haplogroup B in the early 1990s was not as fully characterized as it is today — the diversity within the haplogroup, the geographic distribution of its sublineages, and its relationships to Asian and Asian-derived populations were still being mapped.

The specific sublineage of haplogroup B represented by the Hourglass Cave man required comparison against a database of reference sequences that was considerably smaller than what researchers have access to today.

Later reviews — including the comprehensive PNAS analysis of ancient Native American mitochondrial DNA — incorporated the Hourglass Cave sequence and placed it in a broader context that had expanded considerably since the original 1996 publication.