464 AURIFEROUS GRAVEL MAN IN CALIFORNIA. 



days, as many persons testify. There is, therefore, a ehanee that the 

 .skull sent to Dr. Jones was not the one found by Mattison, but a 

 cement-covered specimen derived from some other source, as Stickle 

 states and Scribner suggested. Certainly there were several months 

 during which little or no trace was kept of the lump of conglom- 

 erate carried home by Mattison. The usual answer to the suggestion 

 that there might have been a changeling skull is that the Calaveras 

 specimen is not a common skull, l)ut a fossil, and must have come from 

 gravel deposits identical with those in Bald Mountain, if not actualh' 

 from the Mattison mine, and that its groat age is thus sufficiently 

 established. But who shall say that many of the skulls found about 

 Angels Camp were not obtained from comparatively recent burials 

 in surface exposures of auriferous gravels or in other gravels where 

 the conditions were such as to permit of rapid ferruginous and cal- 

 careous cementation, giving rise to phenomena identical with those 

 observed in the Calaveras skulls 



Te)<t/iii<iiiy of the sku/l itxdf. — Recognizing the fallibility of human 

 testimonj' and the consequent difficulty of surely connecting the Cala- 

 veras skull with the gravels in place in Bald Mountain, the character- 

 istics and condition of the skull its<>lf have l)e(Mi appealed to l>y advocates 

 of its authenticity. The report on its physical characters, however, 

 made by Jeffries Wyman. dot>s not in any way aid the case. It is to 

 be expected that a Tertiary skull would in some manner show or sug- 

 gest inferior development, but this skull appears to represent a people 

 equal or superior to the present Indian tribes of the I'egion. Again, it 

 is to be expected that some distinctive characteristic, some race peculiar- 

 ity, would appear in the skull of a people separated by uncounted cen- 

 turies from the present; that it would be longer or shorter, thicker or 

 thinner, or more or less prognathous than the Indian skull, but Wyman 

 has nothing more startling to sa}^ than that "in so far as it differs in 

 dimensions from the other crania from California, it approaches the 

 Eskimo." This vague variation is just as likelv to be an individual 

 peculiarity as a racial character. It need not be regarded as strange 

 that the skull should be superior to the a\erage Digger cranium, for 

 no anthropologist would be willing to affirm that the Diggers are the 

 first and only people who have occupied this region during the present 

 geological period. The chances are that the Shoshonean stock, to 

 which these Diggers belong, is a somewhat recent intruder on the 

 western slope of the sierra in California, and more than one of the 

 present or past groups of Pacific coast Indians may have passed this 

 way at some period in their history. The practical identity of the skull 

 with modern crania speaks very eloquently against extreme antiquitv. 



I am glad to be able to introduce here a comparison, made by Dr. 

 George A. Dorsey, of Chicago, between the Calaveras skull and a 

 modern Digger skull obtained from a burial cave at Murphys, a few 



