It is a workable legal standard, but it is not a claim to proven biological or cultural descent from this specific individual.

Whether the Buhl Woman was a direct ancestor of anyone alive today is genuinely unknown.

Whether the communities who buried her more than 12,000 years ago had any cultural or linguistic continuity with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes as they existed in the historical period is also unknown.

The span of time between the terminal Pleistocene and the documented ethnographic record of the Snake River Plain is enormous, and the archaeological record of the intervening period is incomplete and complex.

None of this delegitimizes the Shoshone-Bannock claim.