It is almost paralleled by the discovery made by Mr. P. A. Scott, in Kansas, of a broken knife or lance-head, measuring in its present condition two inches and one eighth in length. Sir Daniel Wilson, who reports it, says: “The spot where the discovery was made is in the Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, in an alluvial bottom, and distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek. A shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich, black soil, and below this through upward of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint was found.... The actual object corresponds more to the small and slighter productions of the modern Indian tool-maker than to the rude and massive drift implement.” But this most careful and conscientious observer goes on to remark, “Under any circumstances it would be rash to build up comprehensive theories on a solitary case like this.”[1519]
If the discovery by Mr. McGee of this spear-head be insisted upon as establishing that man inhabited this continent during the last great rise of the lake, it would be easier to believe that that event occurred in recent and not in quaternary times, than to admit that the distinction between palæolithic and neolithic implements, established by so many discoveries in this country and in Europe, is thereby utterly overthrown.
The only alternative left is to believe that neolithic man was the contemporary of the tertiary mammals. To this conclusion we are asked to come by Professor Josiah D. Whitney, on account of the discovery of the remains of man and of his works in the auriferous gravels of California. The famous “Calaveras skull” is figured upon another page of this volume, where the circumstances attending its discovery are briefly referred to.[1520] It is astonishing to see how frail is the foundation upon which such a surprising superstructure has been raised, as it is found set forth in detail in the section entitled Human remains and works of art of the gravel series, in the third chapter of Professor Whitney’s memoir on The auriferous gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California.[1521] All is hearsay testimony, and entirely uncontrolled by any such careful scrutiny as marks the work of the British Association in the explorations carried on for fifteen years at Kent’s Hole, near Torquay. There can be no question that human bones and human implements have often been discovered in these gravels, but according to the accounts as given these are mingled in them in inextricable confusion. What is the character of these objects of human workmanship? So far are they from being, as Professor Whitney describes them, “always the same kind of implements, ... namely, the coarsest and the least finished which one would suppose could be made and still be implements.” One account speaks of “a spear or lance head of obsidian, five inches long and one and a half broad, quite regularly formed.” Others mention “spear and arrow heads made of obsidian;” or “certain discoidal stones from three to four inches in diameter, and about an inch and a half thick, concave on both sides, with perforated centre.” Still another witness speaks of “a large stone bead, made perhaps of alabaster, about one and a half inches long and about one and one fourth inches in diameter, with a hole through it one fourth of an inch in size.” We are also told of a “stone hatchet of a triangular shape, with a hole through it for a handle, near the middle. Its size was four inches across the edge, and length about six inches.” So also oval stones with continuous “grooves cut around them,” and “grooved oval disks,” are more than once mentioned. We think these quotations will be sufficient to convince the archæologist that here is no question of palæolithic implements, but that we have to do simply with the common Indian objects found on the surface all over our country. Besides the rude cuts in Bancroft,[1522] I know of only one example of these California discoveries which has been figured. This is the “beautiful relic” described by Mr. J. W. Foster, of which he says: “When we consider its symmetry of form ... and the delicate drilling of the hole through a material so liable to fracture, we are free to say it affords an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent.”[1523] Mr. Foster doubtfully suggests that this object was “used as a plummet for the purpose of determining the perpendicular to the horizon.” It has been shown, however, by Mr. W. H. Henshaw, that among the Indians of Southern California similar objects have long been used by their medicine-men as “medicine or sorcery stones.”[1524] Whichever may be held to be the true explanation of its use, either is more likely to be a characteristic of the Indian race than of primitive man.
But the objects whose presence in the gravels is most repeatedly spoken of are stone mortars, which Professor Whitney supposes were “used by the race inhabiting this region in prehistoric times ... for providing food.” One of these is stated to have been “found standing upright, and the pestle was in it, in its proper place, apparently just as it had been left by the owner.” It was taken out of a shaft, according to the testimony, twelve feet underneath undisturbed strata. This was certainly a very marvellous thing to have happened if all the objects found in the gravels are supposed to have been brought there by the action of floods of water. But it is a very simple matter, if the supposition of Mr. Southall be correct, who thinks that “these mortars have been left in these positions by the ancient inhabitants in their search for gold.”[1525] The Spaniards found gold in abundance in Mexico, and the locality from which it came is believed by Mr. Southall to be indicated by a discovery made in 1849 by some gold-diggers at one of the mountain diggings called Murphy’s, in the region in which Professor Whitney’s discoveries have taken place. In examining a high barren district of mountain, they were surprised to come upon the abandoned site of an ancient mine. At the bottom of a shaft two hundred and ten feet deep a human skeleton was found, with an altar for worship and other evidences of ancient labor by the aborigines.[1526] Mr. Southall believes that these mortars were used “for crushing the cemented gravel of the auriferous beds.” Some corroboration is afforded for this suggestion by the fact that stone mortars of a like character are found in the ancient gold mines, worked by the early Egyptian monarchs, in the Gebel Allakee Mountains near the Red Sea, which were used in pulverizing the gold-bearing quartz.
As to the authenticity of the “Calaveras skull,”
“Great contest followed and much learned dust.”
The probabilities seem in favor of its being a genuine human fossil, and the question recurs as to its character and the presumable age of the deposits from which it came. The latest geologist who has studied the locality, so far as the writer is aware, says of these deposits: “Even before visiting California I had suspected these old river gravels might be contemporaneous with the glacial epoch, and I still think this possible. This area was not glaciated, and these old gravels, hundreds of feet in thickness, may very well represent that great interval of time occupied in other regions by the glacial periods.”[1527] In discussing this question from the point of view of the character of the fossil animal remains contained in the gravels, we must continually bear in mind what Professor E. D. Cope says of the Mesozoic and Cænozoic of North America: “The faunæ of these periods have not yet been discriminated.... Many questions of the exact contemporaneity of these different beds are as yet unsettled.”[1528] Professor Cope has previously pointed out how marked a difference there is between the quaternary fauna of North America and that of Europe; we have no Hippopotamus or Rhinoceros Tichorinus, and they no Megatherium, Megalonyx, and other species. Under the varying conditions of animal existence thus implied, to assail established ideas upon the sequence in man’s development, or to maintain that he has had a long career on the Pacific slope of our continent before he had made his appearance in Western Europe, seems to the writer to be an attempt to explain “ignotum per ignotius.”
What is really to be understood by the assumption that man existed in tertiary times? So profound a palæontologist as Professor William Boyd Dawkins thinks “it is impossible to believe that man should have been an exception to the law of change. In the Pliocene age we cannot expect to find traces of man upon the earth. The living placental mammals had only then begun to appear, and seeing that the higher animals have invariably appeared in the rocks according to their place in the zoölogical scale, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, placental mammals, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the highest of all should then have been upon the earth.”[1529] When, therefore, some of the geologists of our country support Professor Whitney’s claim that these discoveries of human fossils have actually proved man’s existence in the Pliocene period, by arguments mainly based upon the effects of erosion and the immense periods of time which these imply, or favor his inference from the animal fossils contained in these deposits that there has been “a total change in the fauna and flora of the region,” and that “the fauna of the gravel deposits is almost exclusively made up of extinct species,” we may well insist, with Dawkins, that the human remains should not be regarded as standing upon a different basis from those of the horse, since both occur under similar conditions. Dr. Leidy reports the finding of remains of four different species of fossil Equus. But among them “we may note the skull of a mustang, identical with that of Mexico and California, which could not have been buried in the gravels of Sierra County before the time of the Spanish Conquest, when the living race of horses was introduced.” Professor Jeffries Wyman says of the Calaveras skull: “Any conclusions based upon a single skull are liable to prove erroneous, unless we have sufficient grounds for the belief that such a skull is a representative one of the race to which it belongs.... We have no sufficient reason for assuming in the present instance that the skull is a representative one.... The skull presents no signs of having belonged to an inferior race. In its breadth it agrees with the other crania from California, except those of the Diggers, but surpasses them in the other particulars in which comparisons have been made.”[1530] As, therefore, what appear to be the skulls of a California Indian and that of a Mexican mustang have been found to occur in the same deposits, this circumstance, instead of proving that man was an inhabitant of pliocene America, would seem to the writer to imply either that these deposits are comparatively recent, or that the fossil bones found in them are so commingled that arguments based upon purely palæontological considerations can be regarded as entitled to very little weight.
But although some American palæontologists are inclined to argue that these deposits belong to the Pliocene, on account of the character of the vertebrate fossils found in them, it must not be forgotten that geologists generally prefer to refer them to the Pleistocene. They believe that even the superimposition of lava beds upon the gravels does not establish a very high antiquity for them, and question whether the time that has elapsed since the outflow of the lava, as measured by the amount of erosion that has taken place in the gravels, is to be regarded as much greater than can properly be assigned to the Pleistocene period elsewhere. Professor Whitney himself admits the difficulty of distinguishing whether “deposits have been accumulated in the place where we find them previous to the cessation of the period of volcanic activity. The gravels which have not been protected by a capping of basalt, or only thinly or not at all covered by erupted materials, may in some places have been overlain by recent deposits in such a way that the line between volcanic and post-volcanic cannot be distinctly drawn.... It must not unfrequently have happened that fossils have been washed out of the less coherent detrital beds belonging to the volcanic series, carried far from their original resting-place, and deposited in such a position that they seem to belong to the present epoch.”[1531] In one of the reports of Hayden’s survey can be seen a plate representing “Modern Lake Deposits capped with Basalt.”[1532] There is sufficient ground for believing that the volcanic activity of the regions of the Sierras has continued down to very recent times, geologically speaking, and that there is no such great difference of age between the lava-cappings and the other beds as Professor Whitney supposes. Hayden thinks “the main portion of the volcanic material of the West has been thrown out at a comparatively modern date.”[1533] Undoubtedly the amount of erosion that has taken place in these river gravels implies a great lapse of time, but so do the other facts of physical geography which have been employed as chronometers by which to measure the time since the close of the quaternary period. To carry this erosion back to the tertiary times, and to assign man his place in the world then on that ground, in face of the arguments to the contrary drawn from archæology, palæontology, and geology, in view of the essential weakness of the testimony upon which the arguments in its favor are based, would seem to be a most hazardous assumption. It is only equalled by the statement that “the discoveries made in Europe, which have already obtained general credence, carry man close to the verge of the tertiary; if not, indeed, a little the other side of the line.”[1534] In the writer’s opinion, this is the belief of only a small number of the most extreme evolutionists in Europe, while the great body of cautious and critical observers think that it has not been proved, and a few are willing to hold their judgment in suspense.
Professor Whitney’s conclusions, however, are supported by Mr. Wallace in the article quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in his character as an evolutionist of the most advanced school. He says: “Believing that the whole bearing of the comparative anatomy of man and of the anthropoid apes, together with the absence of indications of any essential change in his structure during the quaternary period, lead to the conclusion that he must have existed, as man, in pliocene times, and that the intermediate forms connecting him with the higher apes probably lived during the early pliocene or the miocene period, it is urged that all such discoveries ... are in themselves probable and such as we have a right to expect.”[1535] In such a frame of mind it is very easy for him to wave aside every objection raised by the archæologist to the character of the evidence brought forward to sustain the alleged discoveries. To the objection that the objects accompanying the human remains, for which such a great antiquity is claimed, are too similar to those of comparatively recent times, he has a ready answer: “The same may be said of the most ancient bow and spear-heads and those made by modern Indians. The use of the articles has in both cases been continuous, and the objects themselves are so necessary and so comparatively simple that there is no room for any great modification of form.” The writer can only state here that no archæologist holds this opinion, and will refer for a detailed statement of his reasons for the contrary view to an article by him upon The Bow and Arrow unknown to Palæolithic Man.[1536]