The shift in diet documented at Buckeye Knoll — from heavily aquatic in the early Archaic to more terrestrial in later periods — raises questions about whether this shift reflects changes in the same population adapting to changing conditions, or whether it reflects the replacement of one population by another as groups moved through the landscape.

Without genetic data from multiple time periods within the same site, this question cannot be definitively answered.

A third question, perhaps the most humanly immediate, is the question of continuity.

Are the people buried at Bering Sinkhole and Buckeye Knoll the ancestors of any living human beings?

In the strictly biological sense — are there living people who carry genetic material from those specific individuals? — the answer is almost certainly yes.

In the eight thousand years since the earliest Buckeye Knoll burials, the populations of the Texas region have not been entirely replaced.