What Came Up When The Brush Was Cleared

Nobody was looking for ancient human remains in the cedar and mesquite brush of the Edwards Plateau when the discovery began.

A landowner was clearing the scrubland along the property line between two ranches in what is now northwestern Kerr County, Texas — rough limestone hill country about twenty miles southeast of the town of Junction.

The Edwards Plateau here is karst terrain: the underlying limestone is porous and cracked, shot through with natural cavities that form as slightly acidic groundwater dissolves the rock over thousands of years.

Sinkholes are everywhere.

Most are shallow depressions, unremarkable features of the landscape.

This one was different.

The landowner found an oval-shaped opening in the ground, measuring roughly seven feet by twelve feet, with a dead tree protruding from it.

Beneath the tree, a dark shaft dropped into the earth.

It was filled to within about ten feet of the surface.

When he descended into it, he did not find what he expected.

He found skulls.

And along with the skulls, the spinal column of a wolf.

He contacted archaeologists at the University of Texas at Austin.

What followed was one of the most significant cave burial investigations in the history of American archaeology — a multi-year excavation that uncovered the remains of at least sixty-two individuals, spanning thousands of years of human history on the Texas Hill Country, and that raised questions about ancient DNA, population history, and the identity of the first Texans that are still being debated today.

The site became known as Bering Sinkhole, designated in archaeological records as 41KR241, located in the heart of the Edwards Plateau.

Its earliest burials have been radiocarbon dated to approximately 5000 BCE — roughly 7,000 years ago — placing them in the latter part of the Early Archaic period.

The headline promises 8,500-year-old skeletons in a Texas cave, and this article will deliver that — because Bering Sinkhole’s story does not stand alone.