The paper trail associated with the Trail Creek tooth — the excavation records, the collection documentation, the material that established where the tooth had come from and approximately when it had been deposited — was what made it scientifically usable rather than merely physically present.

Without the archaeological context established during the 1949 excavation, the tooth would have been a tooth: old, interesting, but without the specific locational and historical information needed to make it scientifically meaningful.

The combination of physical object and documented context is what the subsequent analysis was built on.

When researchers decided to date and analyze the tooth, they were building on the work of the 1949 expedition — work that had been done nearly seventy years earlier, with methods far less powerful than those now available, but that had established the foundational contextual information without which none of the later science could have been done.

The Child in the Tooth: Reading Development