The ancient Texas populations, based on what is known from physical anthropological analysis of skeletal morphology and from the broader genetic picture of early North Americans, likely fall within this same founding lineage.

The early Archaic inhabitants of the Edwards Plateau and the coastal plain were almost certainly the biological ancestors — in a general population-level sense — of some of the Indigenous peoples of Texas, though the specific descent chains are not traceable through the millennia that separate the ancient and the modern.

What The Burial Offerings Tell Us

Among the most revealing finds from the Texas cave and sinkhole sites are the objects placed with the dead — the grave offerings that represent, in material form, the beliefs and relationships of the people who conducted the burials.

Marine shells are the most striking of these offerings, precisely because they are so clearly out of place on the Edwards Plateau.