The accurate characterization of what can be known and what cannot, of what the evidence supports and what it does not, of where confidence is warranted and where it is not.

The Buhl Woman’s story, told accurately, is one of significant archaeological evidence constrained by significant methodological limitations — a situation that produces genuine knowledge about the early human past of the Snake River Plain while leaving the most important chronological question unresolved.

This is a less satisfying story than “12,500-year-old woman found in Idaho, confirms Western Stemmed Tradition chronology.” But it is the true story.

True stories are more valuable than satisfying ones, in the end.

And this one — the young woman, the obsidian point, the eyed needle, the compromised date, the reburial, the ongoing debate — is true in ways that the simplified version is not.

It is also, despite its complexities and its irreversibilities, genuinely compelling.

A human being lived in the Snake River Plain more than twelve thousand years ago, by any reasonable assessment of the evidence.

She ate salmon and survived childhood and was buried with care and was found by accident and was studied and was returned to the earth.

The questions her burial generates are questions about human history at its deepest recoverable level.

Those questions are worth asking, even when — especially when — they cannot be fully answered.