THE FOSSIL MAN OF LANSING, KANSAS. 463 



THE FOSSIL MAN OF LANSING, KANSAS. 



By Professor 8. W. WILLISTON, 



UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. 



/""^LOSE by the mouth of a small but deep ravine opening into the 

 ^-' valley of the Missouri River eighteen or nineteen miles north- 

 west of Kansas City, and two and a half miles east of Lansing, Kansas, 

 a farmer and his two sons, some two or three years ago, began the ex- 

 cavation of a cave to be used for the storage of their farm and dairy 

 products. In the intervals of their more active farm work, this ex- 

 cavation was carried further into the side of the hill, until it had 

 reached a length of nearly seventy feet. In February, 1902, a human 

 skeleton was exhumed at the end of this cave or tunnel, but it excited 

 no great surprise, since many fragments of bones had been found in 

 the progress of their work. Fortunately, however, most of the bones 

 were saved, though some were broken up and removed with the ex- 

 cavated material, from which not a few were recovered later. In the 

 latter part of March, Mr. Michael Concannon, the elder son, took with 

 him to Kansas City a fragment of one of the jaws and showed it to a 

 reporter of one of the daily papers, by whom a brief account of the 

 discovery was published. 



This notice attracted the attention of Mr. M. C. Long, the curator 

 of the Kansas City Museum, a gentleman who has long been inter- 

 ested in things archeological. Mr. Long immediately visited the place 

 of the discovery in company with Mr. F. Butts, and secured such 

 parts of the skeleton as had been saved. They recognized the impor- 

 tance of the discovery, and, from Mr. Long's description, a more 

 extended account was widely published by the newspapers, with more 

 or less embellishment, as that of a glacial man. On July 18, the 

 present writer, in company with Mr. Long, made as thorough an 

 examination of the place of the discovery and the accessible remains 

 as was possible at the time, the results of which were briefly published 

 in Science of August 1. In this paper he affirmed his belief in the 

 post-glacial age of the remains, attributing their inhumation to a time 

 when the Missouri Eiver flowed at an elevation of forty to fifty feet 

 above its present bed. 



Very soon thereafter the subject received the attention of a number 

 of eminent geologists and anthropologists, those most competent to 

 express an opinion upon the age of the deposits in which the bones 



