He died in 2016, the year before a study that used modern methods to comprehensively reanalyze the Bluefish Caves collection would substantially vindicate his core claim.

What Taphonomy Is, and Why It Changes Everything

The word “taphonomy” is not common outside of archaeology and paleontology, but it describes a field of study that is absolutely central to the Bluefish Caves story and to a large proportion of the disagreements that characterize the study of early human presence in the Americas.

Taphonomy is the study of how organic remains — bones, plants, shells, and other biological material — become part of the fossil or archaeological record.

It encompasses the full range of processes that act on an organism’s remains after death: decomposition, scavenging by predators and carnivores, transportation by water or wind, trampling by animals, chemical weathering, burial, diagenesis (chemical change during fossilization), and the variety of other processes that transform a once-living organism into the physical evidence that archaeologists and paleontologists eventually excavate.