This gap between what the evidence shows and what we would like to know is not a failure of science.

It is the honest condition of historical inquiry into a past that is accessible only through the specific traces it happened to leave.

The appropriate response to this gap is not to fill it with invention, but to acknowledge it clearly while making the most of what the evidence does provide.

The Trail Creek child’s tooth provides a great deal, given what it is.

A precise age.