Ancient DNA analysis was not a concept that anyone in 1940 could have anticipated.

The cave held its secret for half a century.

Then science caught up to it.

The Date That Changed Everything

The Spirit Cave burial might have remained an interesting but not exceptional archaeological find indefinitely, if not for a series of developments in the late 1980s and 1990s that fundamentally revised what scientists understood about it.

The key breakthrough was radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the ratio of radioactive carbon-14 to stable carbon-12 in organic samples.