REMAINS FOUND UNDER LAVA BEDS.
In an article which appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin several years ago, Dr. D. L. Yates, says:
"It was said that California possesses some of the oldest known relics on the continent. The first authenticated record of the original occupants was found on the Table Mountain region in Tuolumne County, and is of an age prior to the great volcanic outburst. Fossil remains of the rhinoceros and an extinct horse are found under the lava layers forming the Table Mountains, which are 1,400 feet thick, 1,700 feet wide and many hundreds of feet high, where the river beds have been washed out and have been covered again to the depth of from three thousand to four thousand feet more since the flow of the lava. This lava rests on a bed of detritus, which is often entered by running tunnels. The human relics and stone implements found in these formations give evidence of human habitants differing from any known since. There have been found spear heads, a pipe of polished stone, two scoops of steleitic rock (resembling the grocer's scoop), an implement of aragonite, resembling an unbent bow, but the use of which is unknown and cannot be conjectured, a stone needle, with notches at the larger end, and the finest charmstones that have ever been found.
"There have been brought to light the fossils of nine mastodons, twenty elephants, various pachyderms in the Table Mountains, numerous evidences of animal life in the calcareous formations in the Texas flats, obsidian spear heads, fossils of the elephant, horse and camel about Hornites, bones and evidences of pre-historic human industry in Tulare, and in Trinity and Siskiyou many proofs of the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct mammals."