Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian
Broadly speaking, these western craniums, like the other skulls I have mentioned, are not typically Mongoloid, and they do not resemble too closely the less Mongoloid skulls of the long-headed Indians of the Plains and the Northeast. Even the freshest and least fossilized specimens—three groups from coastal and central Texas—have “no affinity,” according to the physical anthropologists George and Edna Woodbury, “among the tribes of North America.” Instead—although the brow ridges are “not a conspicuous feature”—they resemble certain skulls from Lower California called Pericú, which in turn resemble the primitive type found in the Lagoa Santa caves. They were discovered in 1883 by the Danish anthropologist, C. F. ten Kate.[29]
Along the coast of California to the north, other narrow skulls with heavy brow ridges have been found in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands and from just east of San Francisco to Sacramento. Some consider the Oak Grove specimens from Santa Barbara the oldest, but until 1946 most anthropologists were not inclined to give any of them more than 4,000 years. Now, however, nine skeletons have been found near Concord which will probably move all the California skulls of this type a few thousand years farther back. These skulls, from what is called the Monument Site, were under four feet of earth which the soil experts of the neighboring University of California believe took anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 years to accumulate and weather.[30] Through shell ornaments in the burials, Robert F. Heizer identifies the Monument skulls with what is called the Middle Central California culture found near the capital of the state.[31] This culture lay above Early Central California, and the skulls of the latter were found in and beneath four feet of cementlike hardpan.[32] Heizer estimates the age of these early men “in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 5,000 years,” but he states that “a number of soil chemists, geomorphologists, and geologists who have seen our Early horizon sites have suggested an antiquity in the neighborhood of 10,000 years.”[33] The Monument Site seems to argue that the latter figure is not impossible. Even this date gives us no glacial age for early man in California, but here again we have skulls that are older and more archaic in type than those of the Mongoloid Indian. They have some features of the skulls from Florida and South America that have been found with the fossils of extinct mammals.
In 1949 Heizer unearthed, not a skull, but the record of a skull that had been found in 1922 embedded in four to five feet of gravel now considered “early Recent.” The gravel and sixteen or twenty feet of silt above it formed the bank of a creek near Stanford University. The skull is long and narrow,[34] and is fossilized enough to suggest a respectable antiquity.
The year 1947 presented us, at last, with an early skull that seemed as if it could be dated pretty accurately without the aid of elephants. Yet without their aid it might never have been found.