The dates are not from a single sample or a single context — they are from multiple samples, from multiple occupational episodes, producing a coherent and internally consistent chronological picture.

This is precisely the kind of evidence that the Buhl burial’s single, potentially compromised date could not provide.

The tool assemblage at Cooper’s Ferry’s earliest levels includes projectile points of types that are related to, or that may represent precursors of, the Western Stemmed Tradition.

This is consistent with the hypothesis that the Western Stemmed Tradition developed from an older technological tradition in the region — that the stemmed point technology visible in the Buhl burial and at other early Snake River Plain sites had its roots in an even earlier period of human occupation in the region.

If Cooper’s Ferry’s early dates are accepted — and they are generally treated as reliable given their internal consistency and the care with which the radiocarbon sampling and pretreatment were conducted — then the Snake River Plain had human inhabitants going back at least to the terminal Pleistocene and possibly into the very early post-glacial period.