The White Sands team did this in a relatively public and relatively timely way, given the pace at which geochronological research necessarily moves.

The result is a body of evidence that is more robust for having been challenged.

The independent dating methods used in the 2023 study were chosen specifically to address the specific objection raised about the 2021 results.

If those methods had returned substantially different ages — if the conifer pollen had dated to 13,000 years and the luminescence ages to 15,000 years — the conclusion would have been very different, and the reservoir effect hypothesis would have been supported.

The fact that they returned ages concordant with the original results is meaningful precisely because the test was designed to be capable of falsifying the original claim.

The broader debate about pre-Clovis sites has sometimes been characterized by less productive dynamics — critics setting the bar for evidence so high that no site could meet it, or proponents overstating the certainty of their findings.