MIDLAND COUNTY, Texas — The Midland County History Museum is always chalk full of new exhibits and their next one is a real blast from the past, as this exhibit goes way past the beginning of just the history of the Tall City.
“I think it's important for everyone to understand how really ancient Texas is and how they're also kind of at the center points of discoveries of pushing the times back,” Midland County Historical Society President Jim Collett said.
A Time Before Texas is an exhibit from the Texas Humanities Council that shows how Texas was during the Paleoindian period.
“So, the eight panels tell you about what we know about the Paleoindian era,” Collett said. “And then quite a few of them go back through and talk about the changing ideas of how we've really pushed back the time frames.”
And according to Collett, it goes all the way back to indigenous times.
“It begins with an origin story and talks about how the indigenous peoples have their own stories about how they begin,” Collett said. “And then it talks about how the latest theories are and regarding how the peoples came here. Also that we've moved it from 13,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago and multiple paths. and then it talks about some of the new discoveries. Perhaps one of the most exciting is a site in Central Texas called the Gault site, which has pushed it back from where we thought they had come to 3000 years, even earlier.”
And if you thought everything was bigger in Texas now, you have no idea what it was like back then.
“What I would always find fascinating are the kind of animals that were here,” Collett said. “One term they often use is Megafauna, which means just big animals, and so imagine a Buffalo 1 1/2 times the size of the ones we have now. Imagine bears that stood up to 20 feet tall. Imagine saber toothed tigers and imagine very small horses. So really a lot of amazing things going on in this time period.”
And Midland has its own claim to prehistoric fame.
“We have Paleo Midland, which is our own particular take on that story, and the central feature of Paleo Midland, of course, is that we have replicas of the skull that was found here in the 1950s,” Collett said. “It only went back about 6,000 to 8,000 years. [...] So, our little exhibit talks about the story of how they found where they found it, and then we actually have now a printout of the skull as they found it in many, many pieces and put it back together. So, you can get a better idea of how small this woman in her 20s was.”
Showing yet another way why Midland stands out in history, or in this case, prehistory.
If you want to learn more about the time before oil and gas, stop by the Midland History Museum starting next Thursday and will run for about five weeks.