The people who made those earliest tools in central Texas were contemporaries of the last mammoths and mastodons, the last horses and camels that walked North America.

They were hunting and foraging in an environment that no longer exists, under climatic conditions that were fundamentally different from the modern period.

Between those earliest arrivals and the Early Archaic populations of Bering Sinkhole and Buckeye Knoll stretches a gap of roughly 7,000 to 12,000 years — the entire Paleoindian period and the beginning of the Archaic.

During this span, the populations of Texas went through the collapse of the megafauna, the stabilization of the post-glacial climate, and the development of the diversified subsistence economies that characterized the Archaic.

The people buried at Bering Sinkhole and Buckeye Knoll were not the beginning of the Texas human story.