User:Jon2546/Calaveras Skull

The Calaveras Skull (also known as The Pliocene Skull) was a human skull found by miners in Calaveras County, California. It was passed through several hands before reaching the State Geologist of California and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Josiah. D. Whitney. He claimed that the Skull represented the oldest known record of humankind in North America as early as the Pliocene, and that it supported his idea that humans, mastodons, and mammoths had coexisted. While there were some scientists who had faith in these claims, there were many others who had believed the Skull was inauthentic and a hoax.

The Calaveras Skull, from William Henry Holmes' preliminary debunking of it

Although it was revealed that there were two skulls that became confused in transmission from one person to another, in the end, they were identified as fossilized Indian skulls of modern type, and it was finally admitted that the one taken from the mine was "planted" from an Indian burial ground as a joke. In modern-day, this hoax is widely regarded as one "the most notorious archaeological hoaxes perpetuated in the nineteenth Century."

Hoax Origin

Discovery

Josiah Whitney— professor of geology at Harvard University that cited the Calaveras skull as evidence of the Pliocene man in North America

On February 25, 1866, miners working for James Mattison removed a skull from a shaft at his mining claim of Bald Mountain, Calaveras County, California, 130 feet (40 meters) below the surface and underneath a layer of lava. Coming from a gravel deposit that was then regarded as Pliocene in age, the Calaveras Skull soon become a subject of great interest among the archaeological community. Soon after its excavation, Mattison gave this skull to R. C. Scribner, a merchant and an agent for Wells, Fargo and Company at Angel's Camp, who in turn gave it to William Jones, a physician at Murphy's, who then notified J. D. Whitney, the State Geologist of California and also Professor of Geology at Harvard University.

Though the skull was at first encrusted with sediment, It was promptly cleaned by Whitney and Jefferies Wyman, a comparative anatomist at Harvard, where chemical analyses proved the skull was fossilized. Whitney announced the discovery on July 16, 1866, at a meeting of the California Academy of Science. Considering the skull to be deposited at the same time as the surrounding gravels, he declared it evidence of the existence of the oldest known human record of humans on the continent— the Pliocene age man in North America.

Public Reception

Although he had cited the antiquity of the skull as proof that humans, mastodons, and mammoths had coexisted on the continent during the Pliocene epoch, the authenticity of Whitney's claim was immediately challenged. The majority of the public, the religious media, and his archaeological peers were suspicious of the Skull's genuine origins. While some scientists supported Whitney’s conclusions about the antiquity of the skull, others rejected them as contrary to evolutionary theory. Because the skull was modern in appearance, humans would have had to remain unchanged by evolution over a period of millions of years for it to date from the Pliocene. From its initial excavation, Whitney's discovery was regarded as nothing more than an "elegant hoax" within the central California mining community and was widely publicized as such. One renowned American poet and short-story writer, Bret Harte, for example, famously wrote an 1866 satirical poem "To the Pliocene Skull, a Geological Address". In the poem, the skull speaks for itself, and declares,

“Which 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!”

Similarly, on November 25, 1869, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin published an editorial on the Calaveras Skull that insisted that the miners "purposely got up the whole affair as a joke on Professor Whitney." Many believed the skull was a "plant" to Jones, an amateur collector, or the "Eastern geologist" (i.e., Whitney), or a practical joke on Mattison by an "anti-scriptural miner". Others, however, believed that there was no reason to doubt the genuine character of the skull and its original situs below the lava since Whitney had "made no attempt to utilize the discovery as a source of profit, and the coming of the specimen into scientific hands was due to circumstances which could not have been foreseen."

Exposure as a Hoax

Old-Age Theory

American anthropologist, and Whitney's successor at Harvard, Frederic Ward Putnam

While the majority of the local residents of Calaveras County understood that the Calaveras skull was "planted" in the mine, the artifact generated a long series of statements, serious reports, rejoinders, rebuttals, and comments surrounding its validity. Even after those involved confessed that the skull was actually taken from an ancient Indian burial cave and planted in, the Skull remained a pertinent topic of discussion among scholars. Some naturalists, for instance, were still convinced the skull represented a very early record of humankind on the North American continent. F. W. Putnam, Whitney's successor at Harvard, became one of the leading exponents of this old-age theory. While many proponents of this theory believed that the skull was "planted", they simultaneously interpreted the skull as a fossil from auriferous gravel that indicated an early record of humankind in California.

Though logical, the old-age theory was disproven shortly after it was proposed. Around the turn of the century, Anthropologist William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution determined that the plant and animal fossils that had been discovered in the auriferous gravels of California near the skull were indeed genuine, but the Skull was too modern, and concluded that "to suppose that man could have remained unchanged... for a million years, roughly speaking... is to suppose a miracle." In other words, it was not of great age.

Accurate Age

In 1992, three renowned archaeologists published an article in American Antiquity called “The Age of the Calaveras Skull: Dating the ‘Piltdown Man’ of the New World.” In the study, the authors undertook a radiocarbon analysis of the skull studied by Whitney, which is located at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. They found that:

"The 14C age exhibited by an organic fraction of the Calaveras human metatarsal bone (UCR-2 151 B) indicates an age of less than 1,000 years. The AAR-deduced age for the Calaveras human metatarsal bone indicates a somewhat older age-about 4,000 years. In light of the problems with the AAR method for bone, we suggest that, in this case, the 14C-based data probably more accurately reflect the age of the bone"

In other words, with the use of radiocarbon dating, the research interpreted the overall weight of dating evidence to indicate that the age of the bone tested, and by extension, the Peabody Museum Calaveras skull, to be late Holocene in age-probably younger than 1,000 years.

Complications

Though the truth of the Calaveras Skull could likely have been determined earlier, there were many complications inhibiting this. Not only did the involved scientists have to find the location of the "planted" Skull, but accounts of those who claimed to have seen the Calaveras skull differed markedly in their descriptions of it, suggesting that more than one skull was involved in the controversy. While the skull described by several residents was black and soil-stained, the one that Whitney studied was white and carbonate-encrusted. It was further confirmed by those involved in the hoax that it was not the skull that had been planted.