The genomes of Native Americans also argue against the ice-free corridor route. We will talk about this more in later chapters, but complete genomes from ancient and contemporary Indigenous peoples show that major population splitting events were almost certainly associated with the initial peopling of the continents. These population splits occurred extremely rapidly—so rapidly that they have been described as “leap-frogging” southward across large tracts of the American landscape. This is not a pattern consistent with slower, overland diffusion of hunter-gatherer populations. Instead, it
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