The Young Woman Found In An Idaho Gravel Quarry — And The 12,500-Year-Old Burial That Complicated The Clovis Story

Then, in 2021, a team of researchers led by Christopher Jazwa at the University of Nevada, Reno, published a paper in American Antiquity that asked a very uncomfortable question.

What if the date was wrong?

The Freshwater Reservoir Problem

The Jazwa et al.

2021 paper — “Reassessing the Radiocarbon Date from the Buhl Burial from South-Central Idaho and Its Relevance to the Western Stemmed Tradition–Clovis Debate in the Intermountain West” — did not claim that the Buhl Woman was definitely younger than her radiocarbon date suggested.

It raised a specific and scientifically grounded concern about why the date might be inflated — why it might appear older than it actually was.

The concern was the freshwater reservoir effect.