The first lesson is that methodological rigor is not the same as methodological stasis.

The skepticism that greeted Cinq-Mars’s claims was appropriate to the evidence and methods available at the time.

But the appropriate response to evidence that cannot yet be evaluated by available methods is not permanent rejection — it is provisional skepticism, maintained until better methods and better analyses can address the outstanding questions.

The Bluefish Caves story illustrates the value of maintaining open collections and revisiting them with improved methods rather than treating initial inconclusive results as final.

The second lesson is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary scrutiny, not extraordinary dismissal.