This acknowledgment was not a concession of defeat.

It was an honest characterization of the complexity of the evidence and the limits of what any single method can establish.

What the fecal biomarker paper accomplished was not to make the Paisley evidence bulletproof — no evidence of this type ever is — but to add a powerful independent line of evidence that substantially strengthened the case while being transparent about its own limitations.

The Fiber Artifact and Independent Temporal Anchors