FEATURES IN-JkSTGRYjQF LjFEON PACIFIC COAST 



PREHISTORIC HUMAN REMAINS. Among the most 

 interesting west-American occurrences of actual 

 human bones which have made some claim to an- 

 tiquity are the famous Calaveras skull, certain stalag- 

 mite encrusted human bones from Stone Man Gave 

 near Potter Creek Cave in northern California, and 

 the recently discovered human skeleton from Pit 

 Ten at Rancho La Brea. The Calaveras skull is now 

 generally held to have come from a cave deposit, in 

 which it may have been entombed for many years. 

 This widely known specimen, monographed by Pro- 

 fessor Whitney, and ridiculed by Bret Harte in his 

 well-known ode to a Pliocene Skull, is evidently 

 not the skull that was placed in a mining shaft for 

 the purpose of perpetrating a joke on the miners. 

 The remains in Stone Man Cave were covered with a 

 considerable layer of stalagmite and may be very 

 old, but it is not possible to make certain of their 

 age. The specimen found at Rancho La Brea was 

 associated with a fauna which is mainly Recent. 

 The peculiar nature of the occurrence in asphalt 

 chimneys at Rancho La Brea makes difficult any 

 definite determination of age from occurrence alone. 



In the San Francisco Bay region human remains 

 are abundant in great shell-mounds at Shell Mound 

 Park in Emeryville, and at Ellis Landing near Rich- 

 mond. These mounds have been partially buried by 

 gradual up-building of the surrounding^ marsh, co- 

 incident with a depression of the region which 

 carried the bases of the mounds from an original 

 position above the sea to a situation many feet below 

 mean tide level. The remains in these mounds are 

 certainly very old measured in terms of years, but 

 they are very young geologically, and belong to the 

 present or Recent period. 



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