You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Seven
The Calaveras skull, 1866
While the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution were rumbling around the world, creationists were not going to give up with a fight. Josiah Whitney, the State Geologist of California and a Professor of Geology at Harvard, had promulgated the view in 1865 that humans co-existed with mastodons and mammoths. The following year what seemed proof positive that man was older than had been originally thought fell into his hands.
On February 25, 1866 a miner working at a mine near the Angels Camp in Calaveras County discovered a human skull in gold-bearing alluvial gravels at a depth of 130 feet that were later buried by millions of years’ worth of volcanic deposits. There were also artefacts found. The skull was sent to Whitney in late June and when he examined it, even though it looked remarkably like that of a Native American, he considered it to be proof positive that it was part of the remains of “the oldest known human being”. When Whitney delivered a paper describing the skull, it caused a sensation, the San Francisco Alta commenting that “it is scarcely necessary to say that the announcement and remarks of Professor Whitney made a profound sensation”.
Not everyone was convinced that the skull was all that it seemed. Doubts as to its authenticity surfaced almost immediately, culminating in a story printed in 1869 in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin that local minister had told the correspondent that “miners freely told him that they purposely got up the whole affair as a joke on Prof. Whitney”. Camps full of gold miners were notorious for their propensity to play practical jokes on each other and their roguish sense of humour, not for nothing did Mark Twain set his notorious Jumping Frog shaggy dog tale in Calaveras County, and some miners may have considered a gullible Whitney, anxious to find proof positive of his theories, as fair game. It may just be a coincidence that calaveras is Spanish for skull.
Shortly after Whitney announced the skull’s discovery, Bret Harte, who is buried in my local churchyard, wrote a poem entitled To The Pliocene Skull. It opened, “Speak, O man less recent”/ fragmentary fossil!/ primal pioneer of Pliocene formation,/ hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum/ of volcanic tufa!”. When the skull eventually answers entreaties to speak, it tells us, “my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted/ falling down a shaft in Calaveras county,/ But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces/ home to old Missouri!”. In 1879 Thomas Wilson, a scientist from Harvard, ran the first ever fluorine analysis on human bone on the skull. His conclusion was that it was of recent origin.
Whitney, though, maintained that the skull was genuine.
In 1899 William Holmes, a Smithsonian archaeologist, decided to dig deeper and conducted a field trip to the site. He looked at the fossils of animals and plants found at the site, many of which were of species long extinct and were of great geological age. The human skull and artefacts, though, matched those of the indigenous Native American peoples. Holmes concluded, “to suppose that man could have remained unchanged physically; to suppose that he could have remained unchanged mentally, socially, industrially, and aesthetically for a million years, roughly speaking…is to suppose a miracle”. He concluded that the skull had been placed in the mineshaft as a practical joke.
There matters should have remained, especially as radiocarbon testing conducted in 1992 dated the skull as no older than 1,000 years. Over the last 100 years, though, those seeking to discredit man’s evolution have seized on the skull and Whitney’s attestation as proof of their theories. A good hoax will never die, it seems.
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If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
