The extra femur that some critics had noted — a thigh bone that appeared in the assemblage records but did not match the other remains — was identified as having been misplaced from another Birka grave. The authors noted that it was labeled as coming from a different burial, Bj 854, a grave approximately a century older than Bj 581. The misplacement had occurred at some point in the handling of the collections. The DNA analysis from the two primary samples — the canine and the humerus — confirmed that both came from one individual, and the age estimate for that individual was approximately 30 to 40 years.
On the warrior interpretation, the 2019 paper restated the assemblage argument while acknowledging the limits of archaeological reasoning from burial to biography. The authors made a pointed methodological observation: the warrior reading of grave Bj 581 had been uncontested for more than a century, through multiple generations of scholarship, when the occupant was assumed to be male. The challenge to the warrior interpretation arose specifically when the occupant was identified as female. The authors argued that this asymmetry was itself significant — that critics who questioned whether the grave could demonstrate warrior status had not applied the same skepticism to the many weapon-rich graves attributed to men without challenge.
This is a legitimate methodological point. If weapon-rich graves do not establish warrior status when the occupant is female, then consistent scholarly practice would require applying the same skepticism to weapon-rich graves assumed to hold male warriors. The field had not been applying that skepticism uniformly.