The Buhl burial with a possibly inflated date and known methodological concerns is more useful to the field than the Buhl burial with an accepted but actually problematic date.

Honest uncertainty is better archaeology than confident error.

Why The Debate Still Has Stakes

The broader debate about the chronological relationship between Clovis and the Western Stemmed Tradition — the debate in which the Buhl burial was originally enrolled as evidence — has not been fully resolved, even with the revisions to the Buhl date and the accumulation of new evidence from other sites.

The fundamental question is about origins: where did the Western Stemmed Tradition come from, and what is its relationship to the other major Paleoindian traditions of North America?