Fig. 94.—Section across Table Mountain, Tuolumne County, California: L, lava; G, gravel; S, slate; R, old river-bed; R′, present river-bed.
Fig. 95.—Calaveras Skull. (From Whitney.)
It was under this mountain of lava that the numerous implements and remains of man occurred which were reported to Professor J. D. Whitney when he was conducting the geological survey of California between 1860 and 1870. The implements consisted of stone mortars and pestles, suitable for use in grinding acorns and other coarse articles of food. There were, however, some rude articles of ornament. In one of the mining shafts penetrating the gravel underneath Table Mountain, near Sonora, there was reported to have been discovered, in 1857, a human jawbone, one portion of which was sent by responsible parties to the Boston Society of Natural History, and another part to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, in whose collections the fragments can now be seen.
Interest reached a still higher pitch when, in 1860, an entire human skull with some other human bones was reported to have been discovered under this same lava deposit, a few miles from Sonora, at Altaville, in Calaveras County, and hence known as the “Calaveras skull.” Persistent efforts were made soon after to discredit the genuineness of this discovery. Bret Harte showered upon it the shafts of his ridicule, and various other persons gave currency to the story that the whole report originated in a joke played by the miners upon unsuspecting geologists. These attacks were so successful that many conservative archæologists and men of science have refused to accept the skull as genuine.
Recent events, however, have brought such additional evidence[DP] to the support of this discovery that it would seem unreasonable any longer to refuse to credit the testimony. At the meeting of the Geological Society of America, at Washington, in January, 1891, Mr. George P. Becker, of the United States Geological Survey, who for some years has had charge of investigations relating to the gold-bearing gravels of the Pacific coast, presented the affidavit of Mr. J. H. Neale, a well-known mining engineer of unquestionable character, stating that he had taken a stone mortar and pestle, together with some spear-heads (which through Mr. Becker he presented to the Society), from undisturbed strata of gravel underneath the lava of Table Mountain, near Rawhide Gulch, a few miles from Sonora. At the same meeting Mr. Becker presented a pestle which Mr. Clarence King, the first director of the United States Geological Survey, took with his own hands out of undisturbed gravel under this same lava deposit, near Tuttletown, a mile or two from the preceding locality mentioned.