The 8,500-year-old individuals from the earliest Buckeye Knoll burials, and the Early Archaic population of Bering Sinkhole, represent a period of North American prehistory that is still poorly understood.

The genetic picture of the Americas at eight to ten thousand years ago is incomplete.

The demography of the post-Pleistocene Americas — how many people were here, how they were distributed, how they interacted — is sketched in broad outlines that detailed studies of specific sites like those in Texas have only begun to fill in.

The specific ancient DNA mystery — can we read the genomes of the Texas Archaic populations, and what would those genomes tell us about the founding and diversification of Native American populations — remains largely unresolved.

The scientific tools to ask and answer these questions now exist in ways they did not when the Buckeye Knoll materials were reburied in 2006.