When one thinks of the eminent Josiah Whitney, that noble and esteemed
scientist of the eighteen hundreds, it is fairly safe to assume that the mental image of Cave Men dressed in animal skins wielding clubs and hunting giant extinct mammals would probably not spring to your mind as a part of your vision of that great man. Yet you probably didn’t know that this now forgotten link between Whitney’s World of Geology and that Primitive World of Cave Men does indeed exist, which just goes to show how little you know about history. If one were to ask anyone in contemporary California what the name Josiah Whitney means to them, they would probably answer with something regarding the mountain peak which bears his name - Mount Whitney – the highest point in the continental United States which is now surrounded by Sequoia National Park. And they would be correct. But if one were to have asked this question to a Californian of a century and a half ago the answer would probably also have included something about the Geological Survey which Whitney headed; the one which mapped and named much of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range during the mid to late eighteen hundreds. Yet the odds are that almost no one, be it in 1866 or in 2016, would respond by telling you a story about Whitney in which Early Man inhabited California tens of millions of years ago; that humans at that time shared this Golden State with giant and long extinct creatures; and that, based on his geological research and recognized historical expertise, Josiah Whitney was a leading proponent of this controversial view of North American History. And yet he was just that, and – according to him - he had the evidence to prove it. If, at this point in the story, your mind is leaping back to the no doubt historically accurate vision of Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C., then you have at last made the leap to the link which I inferred, and one which would have been a most valid leap from Whitney’s point of view. However, poor Josiah Whitney did not have the benefit of the Hollywood Imagination Machine to help him conjure images of primitive men and women in California. What he did have was somewhat less attractive yet nevertheless even more intriguing – he had the skull of an early hominid creature found deep in a mine shaft in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; a skull found in geological strata so old that it proved that its human-like owner had walked this land with the long extinct creatures millions of years ago. So Whitney set out with determination and gusto on the difficult path of trying to convince the scientific establishment of this newly discovered fact. The scientific establishment was not impressed. The story begins in February of 1866 when a man named Mattison who was partial owner of a gold mine near Angels uncovered some bones buried in the mine, in a layer of gravel about 130 feet below the surface. The bones were lying between volcanic material above them and bedrock below. Volcanic activity in this area had occurred five to forty million years ago, and since the skull had most of the volcanic material on top of it and had lain undisturbed until the time of its discovery, this indicated that it would have been from the older end of that age spectrum. Mattison removed the bones, which he could see formed a skull, and brought the bones to a friend of his at the Wells, Fargo & Company office in Angel’s. There they cleaned up the bones and reassembled them, and they clearly saw that it was a human skull. So the skull was then sent to a Doctor Jones at the nearby mining camp of Murphy’s, in the hopes of a determination being made as to its age and manner of death. Besides being a medical doctor Jones was also a collector of all things antiquarian and recognized the skull as definitely being of antiquarian origin. He wrote a letter to the Geological Survey, whose office was in San Francisco, informing them of the find. And who happened to be opening the office mail that day? None other than Josiah Whitney. After reading the letter describing the find, Whitney immediately set out to Murphy’s and Angel’s to speak face to face with all of the individuals involved in the discovery. He was already acquainted with Doctor Jones and knew him as an individual whose testimony he thought could be trusted as both accurate and reliable. Whitney then returned to San Francisco and wrote a paper on the bones, which became known as the Calaveras Skull, and presented that paper to the California Academy of Sciences in July of 1866, a mere four months after its discovery. Unlike today, apparently such dissertations weren’t subject to months of delay and peer review, yet Whitney was prestigious enough to have avoided such things anyway. In his paper he firmly stated that the skull had been unearthed within geological strata from the Pliocene Era, making its age probably between five and twenty-five million years old. This paper caused quite a stir, because then as now current belief held that Native Americans had only been in this area for a few thousand years – perhaps ten thousand at most. So a lot of coughing, winking, and elbow-nudging was no doubt going on in that audience as Whitney’s fellow scientists felt that he had probably crossed the line which demarked the scientific from the incredulous. Nevertheless, Whitney stuck to his guns. But Christian church pastors and the Christian press – both very vocal and influential groups - immediately jumped on the story and angrily argued that it simply was not credible. They claimed it was a hoax and, in a thin attempt to acknowledge Whitney’s scientific prestige, they claimed that the hoax had been perpetrated upon him as a joke by rowdy mountain miners. Whitney was, after all, a man of considerable scientific achievement, and there was a much stronger chance of discrediting the evidence if they excluded him from the charge of fraud – even if that was what many of them privately believed. The western writer Bret Harte also got into the spirit of the controversy and wrote a humorous poem titled ‘The Pliocene Skull’. Whitney acknowledged that many were opposed to his views and replied that the age of the skull was being primarily disparaged by religious critics, not scientific ones. In response to this Doctor William Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution decided that he should investigate the matter. He made the trip to California and interviewed everyone he could find who had been involved in the story, some of whom propounded the idea that the whole thing had just been a joke that had gotten out of control. On the other hand Mr. Mattison, who had found the skull, swore that it was genuine, as did Mr. Scribner of the Wells, Fargo & Company who had assisted in cleaning and reassembling it. Yet now there came a hint that there was also some indication that the skull of which Whitney took possession may not have been the original skull found in the mine shaft; that there may have been a switch which took place either at the Wells, Fargo station or at Doctor Jones’ office. Doctor Jones was a collector of such artifacts, and some assumed that when he’d received the original older skull from Mattison he had surreptitiously replaced it with another, keeping the original for his private collection. Yet there was never any direct evidence that this had actually happened. After countless interviews of conflicting testimonies, Doctor Holmes of the Smithsonian gave up and returned to Washington, unable to reach a definite conclusion about the origin or age of the skull. The Calaveras Skull (or one of the Calaveras Skulls, if a switch had indeed taken place) then got shipped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there at the Peabody Museum Doctor Holmes finally got to examine it. He concluded that it was in fact the skull of a more modern human and did not show the evolutionary characteristics of Early Man, and that it probably wasn’t more than a thousand years in age. This presented a quandary for the religious protestors: on the one hand Holmes was supporting their position by saying it wasn’t as old as stated; on the other hand he was basing that decision on supposed evolutionary characteristics which were in direct opposition to the basic beliefs of Christianity. Should the pastors support this statement by Holmes, or should they decry it instead? No one seemed to know. It was a ‘Damned if we do or damned if we don’t’ situation. In the meantime the director of the Peabody Museum – Doctor F. Putnam – expressed his view that the skull was indeed the Real Deal, and that it presented proof – albeit controversial proof – that humans had existed in California for millions of years longer than previously believed. So he came out in direct opposition to Doctor Holmes of the Smithsonian. Also offering his support to Whitney was Clarence King, a famous geologist in California scientific circles and destined to become the first director of the United States Geological Survey; a man whose professional accomplishments came to be overshadowed by details of his personal life after his death but who nevertheless had impeccable scientific credentials. Another heavyweight weighing in on Whitney’s side was Doctor O. Marsh, a well-known paleontologist who was the President of the National Academy of Sciences. On both sides of the issue men (yes - always men, no women) were adamant. The scientists cloaked their fiery opinions with the pretense of professional behavior, while those whose opinions were based in religion were just fiery; often openly contemptuous. Actually, it was surprising that Whitney got as much support from the scientific community as he did. Scientists are notoriously conservative and generally unaccepting of any ideas which challenge their traditional values. In the instance of humans abiding in California millions of years ago this same prejudice continues to this day, with the Accepted Doctrine being that this area had no human presence until Early Man (and woman) migrated to North America across the Bering Land Bridge about ten thousand years ago and then spread south; that Modern Man evolved only in one place – that being the so-called Cradle of Civilization in Africa - and then expanded from there to populate the world. This insular attitude is jealously and tenaciously guarded, and evidence to the contrary demonstrating that the story of human development is perhaps much more varied and convoluted is often ridiculed or summarily dismissed. So the skepticism faced by Whitney was not surprising to him, for the evolution of humans into creatures with more intelligent minds than Early Man does not necessarily include that those modern men have also developed more open minds. And in support of Whitney’s stand there is other archaeological evidence contrary to accepted scientific doctrine, one instance of which was found a bit farther to the north yet still in California. In a mine shaft in Placer County known as the Missouri Tunnel a human leg bone was discovered, and studies of samples from the surrounding soil revealed an age of almost nine million years. In the mining camp of Cherokee several stone mortars were unearthed in deep mining shafts in 1853, also in levels dating back millions of years. In 1860 and again in 1869 stone mortars, in conjunction with other human tools, were dug up near the town of San Andreas – again dating back well before humans were supposed to be walking those hills. Another instance of discovery took place about ten years before the Calaveras Skull was discovered and yet not too far away. In 1856 Dr. C. Winslow of California submitted a deposition to the Boston Society of Natural History of an amazing discovery in a mine located near Table Mountain. He stated that miners digging tunnels beneath Table Mountain had, at a depth of about two hundred feet below the surface, unearthed a complete human skeleton. The gravel and volcanic deposits within which it lay were estimated to be of an age from thirty-three to fifty-five million years old. From this same mine at Table Mountain, and at the same level of those human remains, numerous other bones from Mastodons were also discovered. This later discovery wasn’t exactly earth-shaking in itself because mastodons were known to have existed in California until about ten thousand years ago when they then became extinct, presumably due to over-hunting by humans. Yet that raised another question – if humans had only arrived here about ten thousand years ago, then how did they manage to kill off the entire population of North American Mastodons almost immediately upon their arrival, and do it with only roughly cut spears? To many this discrepancy supported the thesis that humans had indeed been here for far longer than rigid scientific thought would admit, and that they had evolved systems of hunting, and perhaps even of civilization, which were far in advance of the accepted views. Then again in 1868, also beneath Table Mountain, two skull fragments were discovered at a depth of 180 feet in a horizontal side-shaft leading off of a deep vertical hole known as the Valentine Shaft, which angled off steeply into the mountain. It was found amongst gold-bearing gravel and also in association with mastodon bones. Also found near the skull was a large stone mortar, an obvious early human artifact; a tool which supposedly had not been developed in this area until relatively recent eras of history. Yet the strata in which the skull fragments and mortar were found dated from ten to fifty million years ago. From those same mine shafts beneath Table Mountain a jaw bone was also found in that same strata of ten to fifty million years of age. Table Mountain appears to have been a popular gathering place for Early Man and perhaps it is ironic that what today attracts crowds of humans to Table Mountain is the gambling casino run there by Native Americans, local descendants of those who once walked that mountain on those old bones found from millions of years ago. If you were to do research on the Calaveras Skull today you will find that most scientific sources would still immediately dismiss it as a hoax; a gag perpetrated upon an eager and gullible scientist by miners with a sense of humor as coarse and creative as their homemade alcoholic brew. And perhaps that might be the case. Critics would state this opinion now just as they said it when the skull was discovered; claiming that tests were not accurate, witnesses were unreliable, bone fragments were carelessly catalogued, or perhaps even that the original skull disappeared into a private collection almost as soon as it had been discovered to be replaced by an obvious pretender. Yet it would seem that there is strong evidence that humans have indeed thrived in what is now California for many millions of years; for far longer than the scientific community would acknowledge to Josiah Whitney a hundred and fifty years ago or that they would even grudgingly acknowledge today. Ironically those two opposing forces - those who adhere to a strict interpretation of the bible have this in common with those who adhere to a narrow interpretation of the scientific data – they both deny the evidence of the presence of humans in the Sierra Nevada Mountains dating back into antiquity. Interestingly, in Spanish the word ‘Calaveras’ means skull, and this part of California had that prescient name long before Josiah Whitney stood before the California Academy of Sciences and showed the scientists there assembled the skull of his ancient friend. Perhaps there is an older, as yet unknown reason why this area of the Sierra Nevada Mountains had this name. Perhaps skulls have populated this part of the mountains for a very, very long time, and they occasionally rise to the surface to whisper to us a bit of ancient history. Instead of turning away with deaf ears, perhaps we should choose to listen to what they have to tell us. A deep mine shaft when once excavated may contain more than one type of treasure; but a closed mind which refuses to open to the evidence of the past contains nothing of value whatsoever.
2 Comments
Jeff Lahr
11/27/2019 05:42:32 pm
I've done quite a bit of research on the Calaveras Skull recently (both primary and secondary material). This article is both thorough and succinct. I enjoyed reading it very much.
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Jesse
6/18/2020 06:17:35 am
Why do you write like people are a bunch of assholes. :p I bet if you asked most people today about this fucking guy they wouldn't know who the fuck he is for any reason. You act like people actually know anything about this old fuck. Nobody cares. A few brains maybe a hand full of hikers. Nobody else knows this fucking guy. You don't have to write like a stupid asshole surprising people with shit they don't know. They know nothing about this fucking guy!
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AuthorWith a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. Archives
July 2017
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