None will be resolved by the Buhl burial alone, or perhaps ever, given the inherent limits of the archaeological evidence.

The young woman who died in the Snake River Plain at the end of the Pleistocene did not leave a legacy in the sense that later historical figures do.

She left a skeleton, some grave goods, and a set of scientific measurements and observations that have been debated and reinterpreted for three decades.

What she left, in the most durable sense, is the record of a specific human life at a specific moment in the deep past — imperfectly preserved, imperfectly dated, imperfectly understood, but real.

She lived.