The Trail Creek tooth is a particularly clear example of this principle.

In 1949, there was no way to radiocarbon date it directly.

There was no ancient-DNA analysis.

There was no genomic basis for understanding the population genetics of early Americans.

The tooth was recorded and stored as what it appeared to be: a human deciduous tooth from an archaeological cave in Alaska, potentially old.

The full significance of what it was could not be realized with the tools available at the time.

By 2016, when Jeff Rasic encountered the tooth in the collections, all of those tools existed.