It required going back to the site, conducting additional excavation with even more rigorous stratigraphic documentation, collecting a much denser set of radiocarbon dates from materials distributed throughout the sediment sequence, and applying detailed micromorphological analysis — the examination of thin sections of sediment under a microscope — to characterize the depositional processes that had formed each layer.

This is exactly what the research team did.

Going Back Into the Caves

The renewed excavation at Paisley Caves, reported in the 2012 Jenkins et al. paper in Science, was a systematic response to the specific criticisms that had been raised about the 2008 evidence.

Rather than simply asserting that the original work had been correct, the researchers returned to the site with a research design specifically intended to address each category of concern.

The 2012 excavations were more extensive than the original work, opening larger areas of the cave floor and documenting the stratigraphy in greater detail.