The dried biological trace that could have been ignored — one small dark mass in the sediment of an Oregon cave — became evidence in one of the most important debates in the history of American archaeology.

Its power lay not in what it initially claimed, but in what it demonstrated when it was challenged: that the presence of people in Oregon before Clovis was not a spectacular artifact of methodological error, but a genuine historical fact that new methods and new scrutiny only confirmed more firmly.

The question the coprolite answered was smaller than the question it opened.

That is often how science works.