What was needed was a different kind of evidence: direct physical evidence of what those pre-Clovis people were actually doing.

Not just stone flakes and charcoal.

Not just footprints or coprolites.

But actual hunting evidence — a weapon, an animal, and the physical record of their interaction.

The Manis mastodon rib, with its embedded bone fragments, was potentially that evidence.

The question was whether the science of the early 1980s was sufficient to prove it.

It was not.

But the science of the early 2000s might be.