The effect of the plateau on the Bluefish Caves horse mandible date is that the calibrated age range has a somewhat wider uncertainty than dates from other periods — the actual calendar age of the horse could fall anywhere within a range of perhaps 500 to 1,000 years on either side of the reported central value, depending on the specific shape of the calibration curve and the precision of the AMS measurement.

This uncertainty does not affect the basic conclusion — the calibrated age is unambiguously in the Last Glacial Maximum, and it is unambiguously earlier than any other well-accepted evidence for human presence in North America.

But it is a genuine limitation of the dating evidence that responsible scientific communication should acknowledge.

The development of the IntCal calibration dataset has been ongoing — new versions are released periodically as additional calibration data is incorporated.

The dates reported in the 2017 Bluefish Caves paper used the calibration data available at the time of publication.