Consider older and much higher languages that predated C (1972):
Fortran - 1957 (not much higher level than C)
Lisp - 1958
Cobol - 1959
Fortran IV - 1961 (not much higher level than C)
PL/1 - 1964
APL - 1966
Plus a mid level language like RPG (1959), mostly a programming language to replace plugboard based unit record systems.
From this perspective, C seemed like a very low level language, only a bit above the macro assemblers used on mainframes at the time. In the case of IBM mainframes, assembler macros were used for database access such as BDAM (basic disk access method), since the database interfaces hadn't been ported to Cobol (at that time) resulting in a legacy of a mix of assembly and Cobol programs still in use today on IBM mainframes.