Some Very Early Texans?

I’m still cruising through two histories of Texas – One by the historian Theodore Fehrenbach, the other by fiction writer Stephen Harrigan. (Harrigan has written non-fiction, too, but I know him for his beautiful novel). More later about their very different approaches. Right now – Malakoff Man!

In Fehrenbach’s big book I stumbled across a comment about three stone heads that were unearthed along the Trinity River. High up on the river bank, near Malakoff, Texas, gravel workers in 1929 unearthed a primitive stone head deeply buried in the gravel. Workers thought it was a hoax – they put a hat on it and left it on the boss’s doorstep. Malakoff Man.

A geologist agreed. The terrace that yielded the stone head also had bones of mammoths, extinct camels, extinct sloths. A few years later two more stone heads were unearthed. This was before carbon-14 dating methods were developed. One anthropologist said the heads could have been carved “by a teenager with a screwdriver.”

Now it’s not so certain. Paleo-Americans are now believed to have thrived at the end of the last Ice Age; people who looked different from the Indians of Columbus’s time. Think Clovis culture, and pre-Clovis.

So how about Malakoff Man? Real? A fraud? Unrecognized primitive art? Ritual? The jury is still out. The heads are among the archeological collections at the University of Texas.

“Malakoff,” by the way, is one of four towns in Texas named for a Russian city.

Dac Crossley
January 16, 2020.

“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do.” – Golda Meir.

Comments

[Lesley A. Diehl]

I love learning about prehistory and love a good mystery.

[John R Lindermuth]

Well, that's interesting and a new one to me. I had to go online and look for photos and more information. The carvings are just primitive enough to be real. And, as you point out, we're learning man was on this continent much earlier than we thought.