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in the limestone caverns and crevices of the region where the calcareous accretions bind together bones, gravel (very generally present), cave earth, and whatever happens to be properly associated, in just such a manner as that illustrated in the specimen under discussion.” Yet if we prefer to listen to Ayres (1882, p. 853), we learn: “It has been said that it is a modern skull which has been incrusted after a few years of interment. This assertion, however, is never made by anyone knowing the region. The gravel has not the slightest tendency toward an action of that sort. . . . the hollows of the skull were crowded with the solidified and cemented sand, in such a way as they could have been only by its being driven into them in a semi-fluid mass, a condition the gravels have never had since they were first laid down.”

Whitney (1880, p. 271), in his original description of the fossil, observed that the Calaveras skull was highly fossilized. This is certainly consistent with great age, however, as Holmes pointed out, it is also true that bones can become fossilized over the course of a few hundred or thousand years. Yet geologist George Becker (1891, p. 195) reported: “I find that many good judges are fully persuaded of the authenticity of the Calaveras skull, and Messrs. Clarence King, O. C. Marsh, F. W. Putnam, and W.H. Dall have each assured me that this bone was found in place in the gravel beneath the lava.” Becker added that this statement was made with the permission of the authorities named. Clarence King, as mentioned previously, was a famous geologist attached to the U.S. Geological Survey. O. C. Marsh, a paleontologist, was one of the pioneer dinosaur fossil hunters, and served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1883 to 1895. But F. W. Putnam of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, as we have seen, later changed his mind, saying that the matrix of the skull appeared to be a cave deposit.

Can it really be said with certainty that the Calaveras skull was either genuine or a hoax? The evidence is so contradictory and confusing that although the skull could have come from an Indian burial cave we might regard with suspicion anyone who comes forward with any kind of definite conclusion. The reader may pause to contemplate what steps one would take to make one’s own determination of the true age of the Calaveras skull.

It should, however, be kept in mind that the Calaveras skull was not an isolated discovery. Great numbers of stone implements were found in nearby deposits of similar age. And, as we shall see in the next sections of this chapter, additional human skeletal remains were also uncovered in the same region. The reports of these discoveries, although brief, are more satisfactory than the reports concerning the Calaveras skull. The reports are simpler, providing no basis for charges of fraud—unless one wants to argue that California gold miners suffered from a massive paleoanthropological hoax obsession.

Similar discoveries, although not quite as old as those from California, were made elsewhere in the world, as at Castenedolo. In light of this, the Calaveras skull cannot be dismissed without the most careful consideration. As Sir Arthur Keith (1928, p. 471) put it: “The story of the Calaveras skull . . . cannot be passed over. It is the ‘bogey’ which haunts the student of early man . . . taxing the powers of belief of every expert almost to the breaking point.”

Furthermore, it seems the evolutionary preconceptions of Holmes, Hrdlicka, and others were partly responsible for the scientific community’s rejection of the Calaveras skull, as well as other anomalously old human fossils. We have documented the opinions of Holmes and Hrdlicka in our discussion of the stone implements discovered in the California auriferous gravels (Section 5.5.13) and in our discussion of the Buenos Aires skull (6.1.5). Concerning the Calaveras skull, James Southall (1882, p. 199) said, in a paper delivered at the Victoria Institute in London, England: “If the human skull was exactly the same at the beginning of the Pliocene,