Around the point where the Bluefish Caves evidence has been established — where the cut marks have been described, the date has been explained, the environmental context has been laid out, and the connection to the Beringian standstill hypothesis has been made — a deeper question emerges.

And it is one that the Bluefish Caves evidence alone cannot answer.

The question is not when people were in eastern Beringia.

The question is when people reached the rest of North America, and eventually South America, and whether any of them arrived before what the archaeological record has been able to document.

This is where the Bluefish Caves evidence intersects with one of the most contentious debates in North American prehistory: the debate about pre-Clovis human presence in the Americas.

Clovis is the name given to a technological tradition — characterized most distinctively by a specific type of fluted stone point — that appears in the archaeological record of North America roughly 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.