They had no idea.

And neither did anyone else, until the dates came back.

Why The Age Mattered So Much

The significance of the Spirit Cave age revision was not simply that the burial was older than expected.

It was that the burial’s age placed it at a critical and contested moment in the history of human settlement in the Americas — a moment that scientists had been debating, sometimes fiercely, for decades.

By the early 1990s, the question of when people first arrived in North America and where they came from had become one of the most contentious issues in American archaeology.