The Paisley evidence specifically contributes to this record by documenting human presence in the northern Great Basin at approximately 14,200 years ago — a date that places people in the specific geographic region of the Great Basin well before any European could have argued that the land was unoccupied or belonged to no one.

The specificity of the Paisley evidence — a specific cave, specific organic materials, specific dates — gives it a concreteness that general arguments about Indigenous antiquity sometimes lack.

At the same time, the Paisley evidence should not be used to claim specific cultural or tribal identities for the people documented at the site.

The distance of 14,000 years, and the complexity of the demographic and cultural changes that have occurred in the Great Basin since then, means that connecting the specific Paisley people to specific modern communities requires evidence beyond what the Paisley record alone provides.

What the Paisley evidence does establish is the general fact of deep Indigenous presence in the northern Great Basin — a presence that predates Clovis and that is connected, through the founding maternal haplogroups identified in the coprolite DNA, to the lineages that gave rise to Native American peoples broadly.