The collection that Cinq-Mars amassed between 1977 and 1987 — housed and maintained at the Canadian Museum of History for decades — became the basis for the most significant advance in the Bluefish Caves story since the original excavations.

Without the maintained collection, the 2017 reanalysis would not have been possible.

The specimens that produced the approximately 24,000-year date were sitting in that collection, intact and accessible, waiting for researchers with the right questions and the right methods.

The curatorial decisions made over those decades — the decisions about how to store the specimens, how to catalogue them, how to preserve them from further deterioration — made the 2017 reanalysis possible.

Those decisions, and the institutional commitment to maintaining the collection that they reflected, are part of the story of how the Bluefish Caves evidence was eventually vindicated.