Did You Know You Are Standing On 10,000 Years Of Texas History?
One discovery gave us an idea of how long humans have been in Texas.
Unfortunately, fossils break down, or we might have more examples of how long people have been in Texas. Then there are those rare occasions when something is preserved that can give us a real insight into our pasts.
We know that native people lived in Texas as long as 10,000 years ago thanks to the discovery of a skeleton that became known as the "Leanderthal Lady". That discovery was made forty years ago by the Texas Department Of Transportation (they do a lot of digging). The discovery was made in the Cedar Park area of Austin but was named for nearby Leander.
Carbon dating put the skeleton at between 10,000 and 13,000 years old. It was also determined from the skeleton that it belonged to a woman who was about 5'3" tall (I guess you could ever call her, "the first lady of Texas"(but you'd have to be a punster to do so).
Texas is rich in fossil sites, many going beyond the 10,000-year range. At the Lubbock Lake Landmark, ancient tools estimated from 12,000 years ago have been found that are also dated from around that time. It's safe, but maybe not too scientific, to say that Texas was at least a stopping point for travelers many years ago.
Of course, all of this was just referring to humans in the area. If you wanted to get into other fossils, Texas's number one most common fossils are Ammonites from 65 to 415 million years ago.
So there you go, for those of you who thought Texas started with the invention of the cowboy hat, it goes back way farther than that.