That small, humble object, carrying its molecular record of human presence in the Far West before Clovis, has said more than its producers could have imagined.

And what it has said — carefully, specifically, with appropriate attention to its own limitations — is worth more precisely because it survived the challenge of being wrong.

— FINAL END —

The Broader Lesson of Multiple Independent Lines

When the history of the Paisley Caves research is examined as a methodological case study, one lesson emerges more clearly than any other: the power of multiple independent lines of evidence, each addressing the central question from a different analytical direction.

This principle — sometimes called “consilience of inductions” by philosophers of science — holds that when two or more independent methods, using different types of data and different analytical approaches, converge on the same conclusion, the probability that the conclusion is correct is substantially greater than if only one method supported it.