The eight-thousand-five-hundred-year-old skeletons of Buckeye Knoll, and the seven-thousand-year-old burials of Bering Sinkhole, are not merely objects of historical curiosity.

They are evidence of human continuity — of the fact that people have been living, adapting, and building complex societies in what is now Texas for a very long time.

That continuity matters for several reasons.

First, it complicates simplistic narratives about the Texas past.

The narrative that Texas was empty wilderness before European settlement — that it was a landscape without significant human history — is corrected by the simple facts: tens of thousands of years of continuous human occupation, complex societies with long-distance trade networks, burial traditions that reflect sophisticated cosmological beliefs, cemeteries that demonstrate stable populations with established territorial relationships.

The ancient Texans were not primitive people struggling to survive.