The 13,000-Year-Old Man Found On A California Island — And The Dating Test That Changed The Story Of America’s First Migration
Strata below it, where dated, were older still.
The sequence made geological sense.
The bones had been deposited in terminal Pleistocene sediments at a time when Arlington Canyon’s stream system was actively transporting and depositing material.
The individual had died near the stream — perhaps at the marshy area that Orr described as a cienaga — and had been incorporated into the accumulating sediment.
Nothing about the physical context argued for reworking.
The bones were in primary depositional context, in a stratigraphic unit whose age was independently confirmed by multiple dating methods.