Most of the researchers who were skeptical of Manis and other pre-Clovis sites were being methodologically careful rather than intellectually closed.

The bar for extraordinary claims was legitimately high.

The history of paleoanthropology was genuinely full of spectacular claims that had not survived scrutiny.

But the effect of the Clovis-first model’s dominance was to delay by decades the scientific recognition of a human presence in the Americas that the evidence — when properly analyzed with adequate technology — clearly demonstrated.

The first Americans were here earlier than the Clovis-first model allowed.

They had technologies the Clovis-first model did not anticipate.