With all that evidence, it makes me wonder why it’s taken 70 years to get to this point. It seems that it would be unlikely that it would have been anyone else. Why the decades-long remaining mystery and apparent cover-up?
They lost the original bones, and these are “new” ones?
As I read more about this, I come to two conclusions. First, these TIGHAR people seem to be convinced that they've discovered where Earhart died. That is likely shading what they're 'discovering' and NOT 'discovering' at this point.
Second, if everything reported is true, this could well be where Earhart pul her Electra down on a reef. There have apparently been other findings, including a piece of plexiglass the exact thickness, curvature, and shape of a rear window of an Electra. All these items - a woman's shoe from the 1930's, of the type Earhart wore, with an American (Cat's-Paw) heel; the same model pocket knife carried on Earhart's last flight; a 1930's compact; an American zipper pull from the 1930's; cut-up pieces of aircraft aluminum with the same type of rivet used on the Electra; pieces of a hand lotion bottle manufactured in the US circa 1935; and more - suggest there was a 1930's era Western woman castaway on the southeast point of the island.
Earhart? Who knows.
Also, remember that it was the bones and part of a sextant box (and perhaps part of a shoe) that was found in 1940. Everything else has been found over multiple expeditions to the island since the 1990s, bit by bit. And in 1940, speculation that the skeleton was that of Amelia Earhart was put to rest when the bones were examined on Fiji. They were determined to be of a mixed-race man, if I remember correctly. The bones and sextant box are long-since lost.
It's only been since the measurements taken in 1940 or so were entered into a computer that researchers concluded the skeleton was that of a white woman approximately 5'7". That researcher was part of the team trying to find Earhart and wasn't independent. She didn't have the bones, only measurements made on Fiji 50 years earlier.