Scientists still scratching heads over Calaveras Skull

On Feb. 25, 1866, miners, 130 feet down the Bald Mountain Mine shaft near Angels Camp, removed a well-preserved human skull.

The discovery, dubbed the Calaveras Skull, was proclaimed by some scientists to be the oldest human remains ever found in North America, proving the existence of man during the Pliocene era — 5.3 million to 2.5 million years ago.

Since the skull’s discovery, it has pitted scientists against scientists, evolutionists against creationists, and even drew the interest of Bret Harte, who wrote a satirical poem in 1899 about the relic, titled “To the Pliocene Skull.”

Ultimately, though, the skull came to be known not as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries, but one of the greatest archaeological hoaxes ever.

The late Ralph Dexter, a biology professor at Kent State University, wrote perhaps the most complete assessment of the skull’s history and hoaxes, “Historical Aspects of the Calaveras Skull Controversy,” published in American Antiquity in 1986.

In his report, Dexter concluded: “The desire on the part of miners to play a practical joke, the anxiety of archaeologists to prove the existence of early humankind in North America, the firm convictions and good faith of those involved in an honest mistake, and the confusion resulting from a mix-up of skulls, led to this long, drawn-out controversy, unique in the annals of American archaeology.”

Today, the skull is preserved in a storage room at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, said Pamela Gerardi, museum spokeswoman.

From the beginning, the validity of the discovery had more holes in it than the skull itself — but J.D. Whitney, California’s state geologist and a professor of geology at Harvard, believed and pushed his theory that the skull proved humans were in North America millions of years ago.

On that late-winter day more than 140 years ago, the skull was pulled from James Mattison’s mine, beneath a layer of crusted lava — indicating it came before the Sierra Nevada’s volcanic reign millions of years ago, according to Dexter’s report.

Mattison gave the skull to R.C. Scribner, a merchant in Angels Camp, who passed it on to William Jones, a physician in Murphys — or so the story goes.

Jones, who had a keen interest in ancient artifacts, penned a letter to Whitney that read: “I have now in my cabinet a human skull of Indian type in a good state of preservation with the exception of the parietal and occipital portions, the frontal, facial, and temporal being complete ...”

The story then gets complicated. Not only has it been argued that the skull Whitney eventually received from Jones was a different skull than originally found in the mine shaft — the skull found was reported to be black in color, compared to the white skull Whitney received — but stories from miners who plotted the hoax were widespread.

But Whitney stuck to his guns and at an 1866 meeting of the California Academy of Science concluded, “Man existed in California previous to the cessation of volcanic activity in the Sierra Nevada, to the epoch of the greatest extension of the glaciers in that region and to the erosion of the present rivers and valleys, at a time when the animal and vegetable creation differed entirely from what they are now.”

Most stories about the hoax claim that the skull was planted in the mine shaft after it was discovered in a nearby American Indian burial site.

And despite widespread acceptance among scientists that the skull was a hoax, Whitney’s successor at Harvard, F.W. Putnam, also argued for the skull’s authenticity.

Of the accusations that the skull was planted in the mine, Putnam in 1901 wrote: “I am convinced that they are not worthy of consideration as evidence. It may be impossible ever to determine to the satisfaction of the archaeologist the place where the skull was actually found.”

Many other scientists weighed in on the skull through the years, mostly claiming the skull was planted in the mine shaft, but the most damning evidence came in 1992 when bones from the skull were radiocarbon dated by R.E. Taylor, Louis Payen and Peter Slota Jr. at the University of California, Riverside. 

The results, published in American Antiquity, concluded, “We interpret the overall weight of the 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.”

Paul Heinrich, Louisiana State University geologic research associate, who has written about the Calaveras Skull, is convinced the skull is a hoax.

“Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since my research,” Heinrich said, reached by telephone in his office at LSU. “But it being a hoax is the most reasonable explanation.”