They described the date as likely a minimum age — meaning the burial was at least this old, and possibly older — based on the geomorphological evidence that the sediments above the burial predated the time at which the dating was done.

But they also acknowledged that they had only one date.

For more than twenty years after the 1998 publication, the Buhl date was cited in the archaeological literature as evidence for the Western Stemmed Tradition’s terminal Pleistocene age.

It appeared in reviews of early American chronology.

It was discussed in textbooks and in undergraduate lectures on the peopling of the Americas.

It was, effectively, treated as reliable — a data point that supported the argument that stemmed points were present in the American West during the Clovis period or earlier.