But the possibility that what survives in the White Sands sediment includes actual frozen moments of human-megafauna interaction is one of the reasons the site has attracted such intense scientific interest.

The same careful methodological approach has been applied to the dating question.

Geochronology — the dating of geological materials and the events they record — is a field in which methodological rigor is paramount, because the stakes of getting the date wrong are high.

At White Sands, the combination of radiocarbon dating of organic material and luminescence dating of mineral grains represents exactly the kind of multi-method approach that the field considers most reliable.

When different methods, applied to different materials using different physical principles, converge on similar age estimates, the confidence in those estimates increases substantially.

The White Sands geochronology is not yet final — no geochronological study ever truly is, because additional data always has the potential to refine or revise earlier results.