Each revision does not invalidate all that preceded it. The casts themselves are the creation of Fiorelli’s method, and without that method there would be nothing to study genetically. The CT scans that identified the amulet inside the cast of the child from the House of the Golden Bracelet, and that revised the age estimate for that child, contributed to the interpretive record even though the DNA study has now revised the relational interpretation in which those findings were embedded.
Science in this mode is cumulative and corrective. The interpretation of the gold bracelet adult as female and maternal was not a fraud; it was the best available reading of limited evidence, made without the tools that would eventually allow its revision. The reading was held too firmly and presented too confidently, which is a different kind of problem — the problem of allowing narrative convenience to substitute for evidential certainty. But the revision of that reading is itself a product of the same scientific tradition that produced the initial reading, now extended by tools that were unavailable to earlier investigators.
David Caramelli’s comment about “unreliable narratives based on limited evidence” that “reflect researchers’ worldviews” is a provocation as much as a description. The researchers who read the gold bracelet adult as female were applying the worldview of their time and discipline to the available evidence. Future researchers will bring their own worldviews to the evidence available to them, including the evidence that the 2024 study has produced. The appropriate response is not paralysis but caution: stating clearly what the evidence supports, distinguishing it from what the evidence only suggests, and remaining open to revision when better evidence arrives.