It was an accident in the middle of a construction timeline, and the first response was practical and legal rather than scientific.

After the county coroner’s assessment cleared the site of any criminal investigation, the remains ended up in Swann’s garage — a detail that sounds almost comic in retrospect but reflects the real uncertainty of that moment: what do you do with very old bones when you are in the middle of building a housing development, when the appropriate protocols are unclear, when the scientific community has not yet been engaged?

Swann, by all accounts, was genuinely curious about what he had found, and he was willing to pause the construction timeline to find out.

That decision — to stop rather than cover the bones and proceed — was the choice that made everything else possible.