It said that the existing date might be artificially inflated by somewhere from hundreds to perhaps more than a thousand radiocarbon years due to freshwater reservoir effects.

It raised the question rather than answering it — because answering it was no longer possible.

The Buhl Woman had already been reburied.

What Also Went Wrong With The Sample

The freshwater reservoir problem was not the only concern that the 2021 paper and subsequent discussions raised.

Radiocarbon dating methodology has improved substantially since 1991.

The pretreatment procedures — the chemical steps used to clean a bone sample before dating, removing potential contaminants that could affect the result — were less rigorous in the early 1990s than they are today.

Modern pretreatment for bone collagen typically involves multiple rounds of acid and base washing, ultrafiltration to remove low-molecular-weight fractions, and careful quality assessment of the collagen quality before dating proceeds.