Lansing Man is the name commonly given to a collection of human remains dug up in the loess banks of the Missouri River near Lansing, Kansas in February 1902. The remains were found in the process of digging a cellar tunnel for fruit storage on the farm of Martin Concannon. The human remains found consisted of a skull and several large bones from an adult male, as well as a child's mandible.
Based on this perspective, the significance of the remains was dismissed by most archaeologists as the skeletons were assumed by most not to be as old as the strata in which they were buried.
Currently, the Lansing Man remains belong to a curator of the Kansas City Museum, Mr. M. C. Long, whom had the remains carefully prepared and placed in the United States National Museum.
Later findings
In 1973, further analysis was performed on the skeletal remains. William Bass, a staff member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, had Carbon-14 testing conducted on bones of the lower limbs at multiple laboratories. An average of the results from the testing dated the bones to 3579 B.C. These findings suggest that the remains are from the Early Middle Archaic, rather than the Paleoindian. Although the "Lansing Man" skeletal remains are not as old as some initially believed, they still remain the oldest human skeletons from Kansas.