The model’s defenders were not simply being conservative — they had genuine reasons for their skepticism.

A long history of spectacular pre-Clovis claims had preceded Paisley, and many of those claims had eventually been undermined by methodological problems: contaminated radiocarbon samples, natural processes that mimicked human artifact production, stratigraphic mixing that placed materials from different periods in the same layers, or simply the overenthusiastic interpretation of ambiguous evidence.

The accumulated experience of seeing dramatic pre-Clovis claims collapse under scrutiny had made many researchers in the field reflexively suspicious of new ones.

This was not unreasonable caution — it was calibrated skepticism based on a pattern that genuinely existed.