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I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.
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Notes -
One of Greg Cochran's random theories that may pan out, is that they're slightly more related than that. The idea is that about 20k years ago, there were a bunch of people in north-central Siberia; IIRC his daughter, being a Dr. Who fan, dubbed them "Sibermen". One group migrated E to NE Asia, mixed with the locals, and eventually their descendants crossed the land bridge and became the first wave of Amerinds. A few thousand years later, another group migrated SW to the Pontic steppe, mixed with the locals, and their descendants were the Yamnaya, the ancestral Indo-Europeans.
Apparently big beaky noses were their thing?
That's not a theory. The Ancient North Eurasians were a population that existed in Siberia 20+ thousand years ago before being demographically replaced by North East Asians. The Native Americans got stuck in Beringa during this process so they are about 30-40% ANE. Some of the ANE migrated east into Eastern Europe where they contributed a lot of ancestry to the Yamnaya as well as Scandinavian Hunter-gathers the Germans assimilated. Europeans are only about 20% ANE at most and it was so long ago and so little of the ancestry of moderns I doubt it really matters for any traits today.
As a bonus here is one of the last people who was mostly ANE by ancestry, shortly after her death her people were assimilated by Indo-Europeans.
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