Having established what the Trail Creek tooth revealed, it is equally important to be explicit about what it cannot tell us — the questions it raises but cannot answer, the gaps in the record that no amount of sophisticated analysis can fill from a single small specimen.

We do not know how the tooth ended up in Trail Creek Cave 2.

The child was alive approximately 9,000 years ago on the Seward Peninsula.

The tooth was excavated from that cave.

But the specific pathway from the child’s death to the deposition of the tooth in the cave sediment is not documented in any source.

The child may have died in the cave.

The child may have lived near the cave and died nearby, with the tooth displaced into the cave subsequently by natural processes or by human activity.