Humans in America Two Million Years Ago or Geology's Greatest Practical Joke? The Debate behind the Calaveras Skull Discovered in 1866

 February 25, 1866--two men, James Mattson a gold miner and John Scribner a commissary store owner, Wells Fargo employee and part time miner himself, at a place called Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County, California, are looking-- just like thousands of others among them who have recently headed west over the past decade and a half--to strike it rich by finding gold.

As the men dig their mine down deeper and deeper beneath a layer of hardened lava from an extinct volcano and reach a depth of approximately 130 feet below the surface of the earth, Mattson’s pick hits something hard in a side wall of the mine.  At first, he thinks it’s simply a fossilized tree root, but the two men consider the item oddly shaped enough, and interesting enough, to bring it up to the surface anyway.

At the end of the day, this hard and oddly shaped object is brought to the commissary store that is owned by John Scribner.  For days it sits in the store on a shelf and is largely ignored by everyone, until either an enterprising or bored store clerk cleans the object and discovers that what the men had dug up was, in fact, not a fossilized tree root, but rather a fossilized ancient human skull!

And the Great Legend (or Hoax!) of the Calaveras Skull was born!

Today, Calaveras County California is famous for a whole host of things, probably most notably its giant and iconic sequoia trees which attract tens of thousands of tourists from around the world each year.  And, in fact, even Mark Twain himself had tried his hand at gold mining in Calaveras County, just like Mattson and Scribner.  In 1865 Twain published a short story entitled, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a humorous tale that in short order would bring Mark Twain no small degree of literary notoriety.  But, in the year 1866, it is the unexpected discovery of an unexpectedly old skull that thrusts Calaveras County, California onto the world stage almost overnight.

Location of Calaveras County in California

Once the skull is cleaned, Mattson and Scribner either sell the skull or give the skull outright to a merchant--the truth is murky--who then  sends it for further examination to the official State Geologist of California, and Harvard University Geology Professor, Dr. Josiah Whitney.  In 1865, about a year prior to the discovery of the Calaveras Skull, Whitney had published a paper that put his academic reputation at some risk.  Whitney claimed that he believed mastodons, mammoths and human beings had existed at the same time on earth in the very distant past, though at that time in the mid-nineteenth century, most geologists (incorrectly) believed that mastodons and mammoths had gone extinct thousands of years before human beings had first walked the earth.

So, the supposedly unwitting chance discovery of the Calaveras Skull inside a California gold mine was just the kind of break that Doctor Josiah Whitney was looking for in 1866.

On July 16, 1866 in a paper that he presented to a meeting of the California Academy of Natural Science, Dr. Josiah Whitney declared that the so-called Calaveras Skull was, in fact, an authentic fossilized human skull and that it was nearly two million years old!  Dr. Whitney claimed that the Calaveras Skull was from the Pliocene Age of prehistory and that it was proof that man walked in North America millions of years ago.  Not only that, but Dr. Whitney asserted that the Calaveras Skull, which he dubbed the Pliocene Skull, was the oldest known proof of humanity ever discovered!

Once Josiah Whitney made his earth shattering scientific assertions in a paper that he presented to the California Academy of Natural Science, the 19th century press such as it was, picked up on the sensational story and ran with it.

The first photo of the skull before it was cleaned

The very next day in July of 1866 the San Francisco Alta, the most influential and widely read newspaper in Victorian Era San Francisco asserted that, “The skull is therefore, not only the earliest pioneer of the State, but also, the oldest known human being.”  Italics are mine for emphasis.  The newspaper also went on to say, rather anticlimactically, “It is scarcely necessary to say that the announcement and remarks by Professor Whitney made a profound sensation at the Academy.”

The skull itself became famous and was transported to Cambridge, Massachusetts where scientists, primarily geologists and paleontologists in conjunction with their erstwhile colleague Josiah Whitney continued to study it and marvel at its remarkable age and its implications for early human history.  

Of course, almost immediately, despite the supposed thrilling nature of the unexpected scientific discovery the skull itself became the source of derision to both creationists and believers in the theory of evolution and natural selection alike.  Mattson, Scribner and most particularly Josiah Whitney were attacked by many and accused of having fallen victim to some kind of trick--a fake “joker” skull as it came to be called--that they had mistook to be real.

By 1869 the authenticity of the Calaveras Skull was being questioned by many.  That year an article appeared in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin in which a miner who claimed to have worked with Mattson said that, “The miner (Mattson) had told a minister that the skull had been planted as a practical joke.”  Notice that there are many layers of hearsay and secondhand evidence in this statement, but the debate over whether or not the Calaveras Skull was genuine or a hoax was on.

All parties involved in the Skull’s initial discovery including Mattson, Scribner, Whitney, the California Academy of Natural Science and almost the entire scientific faculty of Harvard University steadfastly stuck to their belief in the authenticity of the Calaveras Skull.

Angel Mining Camp ca. 1870

A west coast religious newspaper called The Pacific sent an investigative reporter to talk to supposed eyewitnesses to the Skull’s initial discovery at the Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County.  In talking to the miners, some three years after the discovery of what was thought to be a petrified tree root at the time, the reporter noted after receiving detailed information from Mattson, Scribner and many other miners who were supposedly there when the skull was unearthed, “Strange memory this, we thought, to retain such minute particulars of such a supposed unimportant discovery, over two years before.”

Clearly, the reporter was questioning why so many people would remember so well, where they were and what they were doing, at the exact moment when what they thought was a fossilized tree root at the time, was pulled from the earth in February of 1866.  By the end of the decade many people began to suspect that the fix was in and that the discovery of the Calaveras Skull was some sort of hoax or practical joke that had been perpetrated by gold miners seeking attention at the expense of America's leading geologists and paleontologists.  

The leading hoax theory regarding the Calaveras Skull is called the Indian Skull theory.  In 1865, only months before the discovery of the Calaveras Skull, miners working nearby had discovered a number of old bones and skulls when they had inadvertently unearthed an ancient Native American burial site.  Supposedly, some of the miners kept one or more of the Indian Skulls and buried them at a location near the Angel’s Mining Camp where one was “discovered” by Mattson and Scribner in February of 1866.

It is asserted that disillusioned miners wished to play a practical joke on scientific easterners, such as Dr. Whitney, who were always poking around their mining camps and searching for specimens of geological interest or archaeological relics.

A San Francisco newspaper reported in 1869, based on hearsay it should be noted, “We believe the whole story of no scientific credence…the miners told us that they got the whole story up as a joke on Professor Whitney.”

The debate over the authenticity of the Calaveras Skull continued to rage for the rest of the 19th century.  The San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported as late as 1898 that, “All were delighted to have the joke on Whiney, who being an easterner of very reserved demeanor, was very unpopular with the miners.”

However, despite popular opinion turning against the authenticity of the Calaveras Skull as the world’s most ancient human remains, as the 20th century dawned the Skull still had its believers.  For one thing, to discredit the Skull based primarily on the fact that Josiah Whitney, a Harvard Professor, was unpopular with California gold miners and the butt of an elaborate practical joke, strained credulity.

Whitney, the California Geological Survey, the Harvard University faculty and everyone who had been a part of the Skull’s initial discovery continued to believe and to assert that the Calaveras Skull was some two million years old and a fossilized human skull from the Pliocene Era when mammoths and mastodons and other gargantuan prehistoric creatures had walked the earth.

Even today, there are many in the scientific community, who believe in the veracity of the Calaveras Skull.  Writing in the Creation Research Science Quarterly volume 23 published in 2023, in an article entitled “The Case for the Calaveras Skull” researchers and scientists Edward C. Lain and Robert E. Gentet laid out the argument, believed by many in the creationist community even today, for the authenticity of the Calaveras Skull.

They correctly note that Whitney and many other scientists had traveled back to the spot of the Skull’s discovery many times in the years between 1866 to as late as 1903, and that they had noticed no disturbance in the mine, or anything else out of place that might have indicated that the Skull had been planted.

The full text of their article in defense of the Calaveras Skull can be read at:  

www.creationhistory.com/research/the-case-for-the-calaveras-skull

Suffice it to say, that as Lain and Gentet state in their article, believers in the advanced age of the Calaveras Skull assert that the scientific community in the 19th century cast aside Professor Whitney’s discovery as some sort of hoax, or practical joke, because it did not fit in with the accepted timeline or location of human evolution as espoused by proponents of Darwin’s Theory of natural selection.

Professor Josiah D. Whitney 1819-1896

As Lain and Gentet state, “In the end, Whitney’s contribution to science will be seen for what it has always been--a fair and detailed study of human fossils and artifacts found in a place little suspected by past and present widely-held evolutionary theories behind man’s origin.”

Either that or Josiah Whitney was the unwitting victim of a practical joke played by some California gold miners, who failed at striking it rich, but succeeded at finding their fifteen minutes of fame.

Today, the Calaveras Skull still sits in the geological artifact collection of Harvard University.  Though, many scientists have long since dismissed the Calaveras Skull as a sort of practical joke or hoax, the skull’s authenticity does still have a small but outspoken minority of fervent believers and the debate behind the truth of the Calaveras Skull discovered in February of 1866 continues to rage to this day nearly one hundred and sixty years later.

It should be noted that modern research has begun to show that human ancestors did, perhaps, begin to first appear on earth as long ago as 2.6 million years, most probably in central Africa.  We also know today, as Josiah Whitney first suspected in the middle of the 19th century, that human beings and woolly mammoths and mastodons did coexist in North America for several thousand years before mammoths finally went fully extinct as recently as only four thousand years ago.  Today, Whitney’s theory for which he received so much derision from both the scientific and religious communities back in the 1800's, that mastodons, woolly mammoths and human beings all walked the continent of North America at the same time, is now accepted as indisputable scientific fact!

So who knows?  Perhaps, just maybe, human beings did walk the hills of sunny California as long as two million years ago, and maybe Josiah Whitney was just a century and a half ahead of his time.  The debate over the Calaveras Skull is likely to continue….