Collagen from an old burial can also degrade over time, and degraded collagen produces less reliable dates.

Whether the Buhl collagen was well-preserved enough to produce a reliable date using early-1990s methods is a question that cannot be resolved because the sample no longer exists.

The combination of these concerns — the freshwater reservoir effect, the pretreatment standards of the era, and the fact that there was only a single date — created a situation where the 2021 researchers concluded that the Buhl date should be treated with significant caution rather than accepted at face value.

This matters enormously for what the burial can and cannot tell us about Western Stemmed Tradition chronology.