Science and Religion Embattled
But by the time the next few finds began to be discussed, the spiritual and intellectual climate had changed. A wind off the glaciers chilled the enthusiasm of the churchly, and banished bland talk of “antediluvian antiquities.” Agassiz and Darwin and early man had to go down together or triumph at the expense of Genesis. The issue was joined. The churchman grew bitter and blind; the scientist, ardent and uncritical.
Of the many conflicts and controversies, the most celebrated raged around the Calaveras skull. Except for the fact that in this case the churchmen seem to have been right and the scientists wrong, it was characteristic of most of the disputes over early man. Fittingly enough, the skull was found in the California county which Mark Twain made famous about the same time by his own discovery of the celebrated jumping frog. There is no question that a mine operator with a reputation for veracity far superior to Mark Twain’s Truthful James found the thing in a shaft 130 feet below the surface. There is also no question that the skull, with its heavy brow ridges, was fossilized and encrusted with the kind of gravel that distinguishes California mines. Unfortunately, the skull proved too much—or seemed to. It lay under four strata of lava and three of gold-bearing gravels, and therefore belonged at the very least to the Pliocene period which ended some million years ago—unless, of course, a practical joker had salted the mine. Some scientists accepted the skull. Some preachers and religious editors were content with evidence from Holy Writ, but most of them preferred the practical joke argument. Various wits and various victims were involved, but the most popular explanation held that the mine operator was known as an agnostic, and that certain miners thought it would be amusing to plant faked evidence for him to embrace—which presumes a considerable amount of churchly enthusiasm in the miners of Calaveras County. Science asked where the miners could have got so ancient and fossilized a skull, and a few scientists and a good many Protestants replied that the name of the county had come from the Spanish word for skulls calaveras because whole skeletons and “uneasy crania” were constantly turning up in its soil and its river beds.
The controversy raged through the 1870’s and gained new vigor in 1880, when J. D. Whitney, a leading geologist of his day and director of the California Geological Survey, brought out Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. In the fourteen years since the discovery of the skull, Whitney had studied the region thoroughly and gathered data from everyone who remembered the circumstances of the find. He concluded that the skull had been discovered in situ, and had not been planted. Some twenty-five years later, when the religious fury of the attacks had subsided, Aleš Hrdlička produced craniums from the caves of California that were quite as fossilized as the Calaveras skull and showed the same heavy brow ridges. He had to admit, however, that the ridges of the Calaveras skull extended clear across the eyes and nose—“a much less common form.”[6]
In the days of Queen Victoria scientists were sometimes as extravagant in their claims for early man in the Americas as the fundamentalists were absurd in their attacks upon him. Fiorino Ameghino, a museum director of Buenos Aires, got a hearing for what he called evidences of Argentine man in an age when the mammals had only just reached ascendancy. He made his initial discovery at nineteen; that was in 1873. For forty or fifty years he went on making find after find and raising controversy after controversy. The fossilized bones of man and mammal that he discovered at nineteen he placed in the Pliocene Epoch, prior to the Great Ice Age; geologists claimed that the stratum where he made his finds is of the Ice Age or later. Much the same criticism applied to most of Ameghino’s discoveries. He set up four primitive types of early man, based on the discovery of various bones, and placed the first in the Miocene Epoch more than fifteen million years ago. The geologists again put his strata in the Glacial period. Anthropologists and paleontologists were quite as annoyed as the geologists when Ameghino made Argentina the center from which all human and mammalian forms spread over the world.
Yet, in spite of Ameghino’s extravagant claims and others that were somewhat less extravagant, belief in early man persisted and grew. There was considerable stir when, between 1872 and 1899, C. C. Abbott and others discovered some primitive stone implements[7] (see illustration, [page 144]), parts of a human thigh-bone, jaw, and skull, in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey. There were more finds at other sites, and by 1890 it was generally conceded by scientists that man had invaded the Americas during or close to the time of the last glaciers. The Protestant church subsided into a quietude which was not to be broken until the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925.