The authors stated that the evidence supported human occupation of eastern Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum, and they connected this finding to the Beringian standstill hypothesis — the model that proposes an extended period of isolation of the ancestral Native American population in Beringia before the dispersal into the ice-free parts of North America and eventually into South America.

The paper was careful about what it was not claiming.

It did not claim that Bluefish Caves proves exactly when the first Americans arrived in the rest of North America.

It did not claim that the Bluefish Caves people were necessarily the direct ancestors of all later Native Americans, or that the dispersal from Beringia happened at any particular specific time.

What it claimed was more specific and more defensible: that the evidence from Bluefish Caves — cut marks on directly dated bones — placed humans in eastern Beringia approximately 24,000 years ago.