The Buhl burial is not a lesser site because of this comparison.

It is a different kind of evidence — more directly personal, more human in its scale, more vivid in what it tells us about an individual rather than an occupation layer.

But the specific chronological argument it was being asked to support required a date that could be trusted, and that trust was now in question.

What Stable Isotopes Could Tell

The carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data from the Buhl burial, described in the 1998 paper, remain among its most significant and scientifically durable contributions — independent of the radiocarbon date, and therefore not subject to the same reliability concerns.