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In another letter, W. Turrentine Jackson, professor of history at the University of California at Davis, stated: “the Indians rarely transported a mortar for the grinding of acorns because of the heavy weight.” Jackson also contradicted the proposition, voiced by Holmes thirty or forty years after the fact, that Indians remained in the mining region: “During the gold rush era the Indians were driven from the mining region, and they seldom came into contact with the forty-niners. I seriously doubt that any Indians had mortars of a portable nature in the mining areas. Certainly they would not have taken them onto a property while the miners were still operating” (personal communication, March 19, 1985). All in all, Holmes’s arguments against the Tertiary age of the stone artifacts from the auriferous gravels are not very convincing.

(4) Holmes and Sinclair were unable to believe that humans of the modern type could have existed millions of years ago. And even if they did exist, their implements could not, they believed, have remained the same from then until now. The implements from the ancient gold-bearing gravels closely resembled those used by Indians in relatively recent times. According to evolutionary principles, the implements should have been much different. This suggested to Holmes, Sinclair, and Hrdlicka that the implements from the gold-bearing gravels were in fact of recent manufacture. But on examining these implements, both the ones from the gold-bearing gravels and those known to have been made by Indians in recent historical times, we see that they are simple artifacts of a kind that would naturally have been manufactured by any Neolithic-type culture anywhere in the world and at any time down through history. For example, stone artifacts from Neolithic sites at Beidha in the Middle East and the Nakura site in East Africa (Figure 5.15) are very much like those known to have been made by California Indians in recent historical times. According to standard views of human prehistory, the cultures of the ancient Middle East and East Africa have no direct relation to those of the American Indians. This means that the mortars of California and the Middle East, although very similar in appearance, were developed independently. So if different peoples separated by thousands of miles independently developed similar implements, this suggests that different peoples separated by millions of years could have done the same.

Figure 5.15. Left: Stone bowl from Nakura, Kenya (L. Leakey 1931, p. 219). Center: Pestle from the Beidha site, in the Middle East (Singh 1974, p. 29). Right: A mortar and pestle from the Beidha site (Singh 1974, p. 29). Neolithic implements like these, manufactured at various locations around the world during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, resemble implements found in Tertiary gravels in California gold mines (compare Figures 5.13 and 5.14). Holmes and Sinclair thought the implements found in the mines were recent because they looked like implements used by the California Indians of recent historical times. But the fact that such implements have been manufactured by African and Middle Eastern peoples, with no connection to the California Indians, shows that the mortars and pestles from the mines are of a type that might be made by people living at any time and any place. Thus the resemblance of tools from the California gold mines to recent tools found in the same region does not rule out their great antiquity.

(5) A final objection was that the artifacts were generally found by inexpert persons who could have been deceived by fraud, but George F. Becker, a professional geologist, disagreed. “Now, so far as the detection of a fraud is concerned,” said Becker (1891, pp. 192–193), “a good miner, regularly employed in superintending the workings would be much more competent than the average geological visitor. The superintendent sees day by day every foot of new ground exposed, and it is his business to become thoroughly acquainted with its character, while he is familiar with every device for