The questions about whether the burial contained one individual or two, about the exact spatial relationship between different categories of artifacts, and about the precise character of the burial structure cannot be fully resolved given the information available.

What subsequent research has been able to do is focus on the objects themselves — on the detailed analysis of the stone tool assemblage, the red ochre, the bone tools, and the human remains — to extract as much information as possible from the evidence that was recovered, whatever its original context.

The 2014 genomic analysis is the most spectacular example of this post-hoc information extraction, but it is part of a longer pattern of progressive scientific analysis of the Anzick material.

The Bone Tools and Their Mystery