Science: Early American

In 1937 a University of New Mexico student chanced upon some provocative remains in a cave at Sandia, about 15 miles outside Albuquerque. His anthropology professor, Frank Cummings Hibben, examined the cave and got pretty excited himself. On the cave's lowest level, Hibben's party found fragments of the tusk of a Pleistocene mammoth, along with a few ancient flint spearheads.

Hibben thought the remains had been left by an ancient human hunter, who had dragged the beast's carcass into the cave. He christened him Sandia Man. He estimated that Sandia Man was of an even earlier generation than the 10,000-year-old Folsom Man,...

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