The lesson is that the process — the testing, the skepticism, the demand for better evidence, the development of better methods — eventually yields a more reliable understanding than intuition or authority alone could provide.

The Manis bone point is now one of the best-documented pre-Clovis hunting events in the Americas not because someone asserted it powerfully in the late 1970s, but because the evidence for it has been tested by multiple independent methods and found to be robust.

That robustness is the product of the scientific process, operating imperfectly and slowly but ultimately in the direction of a better understanding of what happened in that ancient landscape.

The Legacy Of A Broken Tip