But they could not be completely ruled out without better evidence than was available in the 1980s.

The Manis site entered a kind of scientific limbo: too significant to dismiss entirely, too ambiguous to accept fully.

Gustafson continued to advocate for the site’s importance.

The mainstream of American archaeology treated it as interesting but unconfirmed.

And the fragments inside the rib continued to wait inside the bone, carrying their evidence, for the technology that could finally read it.

What “Clovis-First” Once Meant And Why It Mattered