People were being buried with objects that expressed something about their identity, their skills, their relationships, or their community’s beliefs about what happens after death.

This is human behavior in its most fundamental sense — the recognition of individuals as individuals, the care taken with the dead, the meaning-making that sets human communities apart.

The dating question — the freshwater reservoir problem, the single-date limitation, the pretreatment standards of 1991 — is a scientific problem that the field can now address for future cases even though it cannot be resolved for this one.

The Buhl case has improved the discipline’s awareness of the conditions under which bone collagen dates from ancient individuals who ate fish must be interpreted with additional caution and ideally supplemented with additional evidence.