What they could not have imagined, we can now begin to understand.

And what we now understand points, through all the complexity and all the remaining uncertainty, to one durable fact: people were here, in this landscape, before Clovis — and the evidence they left behind, humble as it was, survived 14,000 years and a century of scientific argument to say so.

— END —

— EXTENDED SECTIONS —

The Chemistry of Preservation: Why Great Basin Caves Work

The specific preservation conditions that made the Paisley coprolites informative need to be understood in some detail, because the preservation is not accidental — it reflects specific chemical and physical characteristics of the cave environment that archaeologists have learned to recognize as predictors of organic material survival.