Sandia man.

They lived up the hill from me before I moved in.

A number of improvements have been made on the place since they lived there, but people occupied that cave on and off for centuries without the wire cage to keep the animalcules out and the spiral staircase to make it easier to get down to the stream where I took this picture.

The cave location has some high points.  It's located high enough up that cliff to keep the large animals out, but it faces enough westerly to catch the afternoon sunlight.

I'd imagine the place was mostly a summer home.

The moniker the pointy-heads have put on the time when the best (earliest) people occupied this cave is Folsum-Midland.  It was a period of warming, and the large megafauna were mostly killed off during the time of their ancestors, but evidently these folks got one.  A wooly mammoth.  Maybe the last one in New Mexico.  The bones were found in that cave.

They did pretty nice rock work in their tool making.  Notice how long the chip was that runs left to right.  That's typical of the sort of job they did on rocks.  Beautiful spearheads.

 

 

The guy who owned this one clearly used it a long while.  It's battered, pitted and re-sharpened, but he evidently hit a bad platform sharpening it for the last time.  The place I found it left me with the impression he discarded it, maybe in disgust.

Jack

Things have changed in some ways, but in others they probably aren't all that different.