A new team of researchers applied updated methodological awareness to the single date, found it wanting, and published their concerns.

The Buhl burial’s role in the chronological debates of western North American archaeology was revised, though not eliminated.

And through all of this, the Buhl Woman remained simply what she was: a young person who lived in the early human past of the Snake River Plain, who survived a hard childhood, who ate salmon from the river, who was buried by people who cared for her, and who was eventually found by people who cared for what she could tell them.

What she could tell them was limited by the conditions of her preservation, by the methods available for analysis, by the decisions made about her repatriation, and by the date that may or may not accurately represent the moment of her death.