Various North American sites were producing pre-Clovis evidence.

The simple Clovis-first story was fracturing under the weight of contradictory data.

Into this debate came the Spirit Cave Man — an individual who had lived more than 10,000 years ago, who was associated not with Clovis technology but with a different stone tool tradition known as the Western Stemmed Tradition, and whose physical remains would eventually raise additional questions about who the earliest Americans had been and what their relationship was to the Native peoples of the present day.

But before the full scientific significance of the burial could be worked out, a different and more immediate controversy erupted — one that would define the Spirit Cave case for the next two decades and that would ultimately determine whether the DNA analysis that transformed the scientific understanding of the burial was ever conducted at all.