The discovery of preserved intracranial tissue at Windover was not merely a visual or structural observation.

The 1986 Nature paper went further: it reported that the research team had successfully recovered DNA from the preserved material.

To understand what this meant, it is necessary to understand the scientific context of 1986.

The field that would come to be called ancient DNA science was barely established when the Windover paper appeared.

The first successful recovery of genetic material from an ancient biological sample — degraded but recoverable genetic material from ancient human tissue — had been reported only a few years earlier, in 1984 and 1985.

These early papers had demonstrated that ancient DNA could be extracted and analyzed, but the techniques available were primitive by modern standards: polymerase chain reaction, the technology that would make ancient DNA analysis practical and widespread, was only being developed at the same time the Windover excavations were underway.