What remains open: the identity of the individual in any personal or cultural sense, the specific nature of the watercraft used, the exact route traveled to reach Santarosae, the biological relationships between this person and later Channel Islands populations, and the specific place of this individual within the broader history of initial American settlement.

These open questions are not failures of the science.

They are the honest acknowledgment of what fragmentary terminal Pleistocene bones can and cannot tell us.

The evidence is what it is: two femora, approximately 13,000 years old, from an island off the California coast.

Everything else is inference, some of it well-supported, some of it speculative, all of it subject to revision as new evidence accumulates.

Phil Orr saw something in a canyon wall in 1959 that he recognized as important.