The earlier conclusions were not failures; they were the best available results at their time.

The Americans Who Were Already Coastal

The Arlington Springs individual was not, in 13,000 BCE, the only person on the Pacific coast of North America.

The evidence from multiple sites — the Channel Islands archaeological record as a whole, the early dates from coastal Alaska and British Columbia, the Monte Verde evidence from southern Chile that requires some coastal pathway — together document a Pacific coastal presence in the terminal Pleistocene that was not a single person’s exploit but a sustained population characteristic.

What the Arlington Springs individual represents, specifically, is one person whose remains happened to be preserved in a geological context that survived the post-glacial sea-level rise and that was accessible to a twentieth-century archaeologist conducting research on an island that is now protected as a national park.