Evidence staleness: how old is too old?

A question I see asked a lot in different forms: does older evidence still count, or does it need to be recent? The honest answer is more nuanced than a hard cutoff, and worth understanding rather than just assuming either "everything counts forever" or "only the last year matters." What actually matters is less the raw age of the evidence and more whether it supports a credible claim of current or sustained standing. A major award from eight years ago is still real evidence — but if it's the only evidence in your file and there's nothing more recent, a reviewer may reasonably ask whether the acclaim it represents has actually been sustained, or whether it was a single high point long past. Evidence that shows a pattern over time — not just one distant peak — tends to build a stronger sustained-acclaim argument than either all-recent or all-old evidence alone. Practically: I didn't discard my older, genuinely strong evidence, but I made sure to pair it with more recent evidence showing continued relevance and activity in the field, so the overall record read as ongoing rather than a single moment in the past.