DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, the marker up here calls this one Midland Man — but hold onto that name, because the story's got a twist built right into it. Back in 1953, a pipeline welder by the name of Keith Glasscock was out working on a ranch near here, just doing his job, when he came across something that stopped him cold.
Weather conditions had done what weather does out here in West Texas — stripped the earth back, peeled away the layers — and what got exposed were bones. Fossilized bones. A skull.
Ribs. Hand bones. Now a lot of folks might've kept walking.
Keith Glasscock did not. And that decision turned out to matter in a way nobody could've predicted standing out there in the Midland heat. When scientists got hold of those bones and ran their tests, what they found was this: these were the remains of a woman.
The oldest human remains ever found in the New World. And she had lived as long ago as nine thousand to ninety-five hundred years before Christ. Let that settle in for a second.
That is a long time before anyone was writing anything down, before cities, before just about anything we call civilization. And she was right here. Scattered around her were the bones of creatures that no longer walk this earth — an extinct species of horse, camel, mammoth, peccary, wolf, and sloth.
There were weapons. Tools. And signs of ancient campfires.
Someone had lived here, around those fires, at the edge of a world we can barely imagine. The discovery drew serious minds from across the country. Archaeologists Fred Wendorf and Alex D.
Kreiger came to study it. Geologist Claude C. Albritton came to study it.
Physician and anthropologist T. D. Stewart came to study it.
Together they worked to understand what Keith Glasscock had stumbled across on an ordinary workday. So yeah — the marker calls her Midland Man. But she was a woman.
And she was here first.
What the marker says
Oldest human remains in new world. Found 1953 on ranch near here by pipeline welder Keith Glasscock. Fossilized skull, rib and hand bones had been exposed by weather conditions. Tests indicated these were bones of a woman who lived as long ago as 9000-9500 B. C.; nearby were bones of extinct species of horse, camel, mammoth, peccary, wolf, sloth; with weapons, tools and signs of ancient campfires. Drs. Fred Wendorf and Alex D. Kreiger, archaeologists; Claude C. Albritton, geologist; T. D. Stewart, physician and anthropologist, made studies of the discovery.