This was important for the Spirit Cave materials because it meant that a tiny sample of the burial textiles could be dated without destroying significant amounts of the preserved material.

In the 1990s, when researchers finally applied modern radiocarbon dating to samples from the Spirit Cave burial, the results were stunning.

The tule mats were not 1,500 to 2,000 years old.

They were approximately 9,400 years old.

The moccasins dated to a similar period.

The animal skins of the burial wrapping and the materials associated with the individual were all consistently old — not ancient in the geological sense, but old in the fullest human sense of the word: deposited at a time when the Egyptian civilization did not yet exist, when the first urban centers in Mesopotamia were still millennia away, when most of Europe was still inhabited by hunter-gatherers.

The individual’s own remains — the bone and tissue that the cave had preserved through the millennia — eventually dated to approximately 10,600 years before the present.