Word: midlands
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About a year ago, Keith Glasscock, a pipeline welder and amateur archaeologist, spent a Sunday afternoon poking around the Scharbauer Ranch near Midland, Texas. In a "blowout" (a hollow scooped by wind), he found some Folsom points. When he returned a few days later, the wind had dug the hollow deeper. On the surface of the blowing sand were fragments that looked like broken human bones. Glasscock picked them up, but was wise enough not to dig without expert advice...
...days later, he went to Santa Fe and told Anthropologist Fred Wendorf of the Museum of New Mexico about his bones and points. Dr. Wendorf was so enthusiastic that Glasscock gave him the whole collection. Soon Wendorf and a group of learned colleagues were digging a trench at the Midland site. They found a few more bone fragments, and six months later, in a full-dress expedition, found a selection of ice-age animals, most of which were probably extinct before the period of Folsom man. It looked as if both human and animal bones had come from a stratum...
...relic of New World man. Dr. F. J. McClure of the National Institute of Health analyzed both animal and human bones for their fluorine content, which increases with age. He decided that their age is about the same. Since the animals lived in the Pleistocene (glacial) era, "Midland man" must be Pleistocene too. He may have lived anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 years before Folsom man, who therefore remains a ghost, but is no longer the oldest American...
...Midland man, according to Dr. Stewart, had a long, narrow skull and probably looked like a modern Indian. The bones found were probably those of a male who had serious trouble with his teeth. At the time of his death, when the glaciers still covered much of the U.S., one of his teeth was growing up toward his nose...
...solemn summary, the American Football Coaches Association counted the year's cost in lives: five in high-school football, two in college football (at Boston U. and Nebraska's Midland College), two in athletic clubs and one in a sand-lot game...