HUMAN RELICS OF LANSING, KANSAS 77 S 



rising because of the filling of glacial wash poured into it at the 

 north. In this case it would be assumed that the tributary val- 

 ley had previously been fashioned as it is now, that with the 

 filling up of the Missouri valley it also became filled in the 

 lower part, involving the burial of the relics, and that with 

 the lowering of the Missouri since the glacial period, it has been 

 re-excavated to its present extent. In this case the filling should 

 have combined the characters of a glacio-fluvial deposit and a 

 back-water deposit. The actual deposit does not seem to me 

 to be of this kind. The present adjustment of the tributary to 

 the Missouri river must also, in this case, be regarded as an 

 accident, however improbable. 



3) It has been held by Upham and Winchell that the loess- 

 like deposit covering the relics is a part of the sheet of loess 

 that mantles the uplands of this region generally, and is referred 

 to the Iowan stage of glaciation, and that the relics were buried 

 in the early stages of this accumulation, or earlier. This view 

 receives more apparent than real support from the partial resem- 

 blance- of the upper part of the deposit to loess. As already 

 stated, this does not seem to me to be true original loess, either 

 of the upland or of the fluvial type, but a secondary deposit, in 

 part, and only in part, derived from the loess. If so, its age is 

 that of its derivation, not that of the parent loess. Very similar 

 deposits seem to have been formed at all ages since the main 

 loess epoch, and are being formed now, and apparently must con- 

 tinue to be formed as long as the general loess mantle remains 

 the chief source of erosion and re-deposition, but these deposits 

 generally betray their origin by their secondary characters, as 

 in this case. 



4) It is even possible to regard the limestone debris in which 

 the skeleton was found as preglacial detritus, buried first by 

 the Kansan drift, which was afterward eroded, and then by the 

 loess-like deposit ; but in the first place, the detritus is not of 

 the distinctive residual surface type, since it is not thoroughly 

 weathered and leached as such deposits usually are, and in the 

 second place, the hypothesis assumes that the post-Kansan ero- 

 sion was adjusted to the preglacial erosion with a degree of 



