Florida archaeology is full of sites where the stone tools and ceramic fragments survive but the bones that might have accompanied them are entirely gone, dissolved by the acidic ground.

Human remains found in typical Florida soil contexts are rarely more than a few hundred years old.

The Windover bones were different.

Their condition — the preservation of structural integrity, the specific quality of the mineralization — spoke of a chemical environment very different from typical Florida soil.

The heavy wear on the teeth was the most immediate biological indicator of antiquity: the kind of tooth surface abrasion seen at Windover is a signature of people who spent their lives eating food processed with stone tools, food that incorporated grit and sand and coarse plant material in ways that modern diets do not.

Modern teeth simply do not look like this.