If the date is reliable, the Buhl Woman lived during the terminal Pleistocene, and the stemmed biface beside her is direct evidence of a Western Stemmed Tradition individual at a time when Clovis was present elsewhere in North America.

If the date is artificially inflated by even 500 to 1,000 radiocarbon years, the burial might date to the early Holocene — still early, still important, but no longer a direct data point in the Clovis/Western Stemmed Tradition chronological debate.

The difference between those two scenarios is archaeologically significant.

And the evidence needed to resolve the question is no longer available for testing.

The Second Opening — A Date We Can’t Test And A Debate We Can’t Close