In February, 1866, miner Jim Matteson first reported finding an oddly-shaped object in a mine shaft he was sinking on a hill near Angel's Camp in California's Calaveras County. Once the limestone encrustation was chipped away, the object proved to be a human skull. Not being an expert on human remains, Matteson then passed his discovery on to Doctor William Jones at Murphy's Diggings. Along with being a physician, Dr. Jones was also an amateur archaeologist with a reputation for collecting and studying fossils.
On doing his own investigating, Dr. Jones learned that the skull had been found far deeper underground than human remains had ever been seen before, he immediately alerted Dr. Josiah Whitney. A professor of geology at Harvard University and chief of the California Geological Survey, Dr. Whitney was probably one of the most eminent geologists in the country. Learning where the skull had been found, Whitney rushed to the dig site in an attempt to date the skull from the surrounding strata (which was the only practical method available in an era before carbon-dating).
Based on his careful analysis of the surrounding rock fragments in the spot where Matteson reported finding the skull, Josiah Whitney came to a breath-taking conclusion. Based on his research, the eminent geologist concluded that the fossil skull dated back to the Pliocene epoch (approximately five million years ago). Not only did the skull apparently predate any human remains ever found before in the Americas, but seemed millions of years older than human remains found anywhere else in the world, either.
Given that Charles Darwin had published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, just a few years earlier, the debate on human evolution was already transforming science. For Josiah Whitney, the Calaveras skull represented the greatest discovery of his career, something he was sure would rock his fellow scientists. And it did, though many others were naturally skeptical. Had it not been for Josiah Whitney's own professional reputation, they might have dismissed the discovery as an outright fraud.
Still, despite professional misgivings, the prospect of North America being declared the true birthplace of the human race was far too tantalizing a prospect to be ignored. And so, the Calaveras skull was displayed around the country and even crossed the Atlantic to be shown to scholars in Europe. While many critics suggested that the skull didn't appear to be more than 1000 years old, at best, Whitney and his supporters insisted it was genuine.
Unfortunately for Whitney, rumours about the actual source of the skull were already being spread in Angel's Camp, not far from where it had been found. A local bartender named Ross Coon, who apparently had quite a reputation as a practical joker and a "teller of tall tales" began widely hinting about the truth behind the "scientific discovery". Coon had already gained some literary immortality by supplying Mark Twain with many of the details that went into his celebrated jumping frog story. Word in town soon began to spread that Coon and another local prankster, J. C. Scribiner, had actually dug up the skull from an old native burial ground and had planted it in the shaft that Matteson had been digging.
Though Whitney soon learned about this story, which was published in the San Francisco Bulletin just three years after the skull's discovery, he continued to defend his find as being real. Hardly a stranger to controversy (he was well-known for verbally abusing his scientific rivals), Whitney dismissed all suggestions of fraud up to his death in 1896. Even into first decade of the 20th century, supporters continued to defend the skull as genuine.
Ironically enough, however, interest in the Calaveras skull dropped off with the announced discovery of the first Piltdown skull fragments in 1912. Supposedly discovered by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson from a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, the skull fragments appeared to be of a previously-unknown hominid with a human-like cranium but with a jaw and teeth more like a chimpanzee. Dubbed "Piltdown Man" by British geologists, the hominid was quickly proclaimed to be evidence of the long-sought "missing link" between humans and apes. Though some contemporary experts suspected fraud, Dawson's discovery still became embraced as evidence of human evolution for decades afterward. It was only with the invention of carbon dating that experts were finally able to announce that Piltdown Man was a deliberate fraud. The identity of the perpetrator, whether Charles Dawson himself or someone else close to him, has never been determined.
As for the Calaveras skull itself, visitors to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts can still see it on display. In case you were wondering, researchers finally conducted modern testing on the skull in 1986. According to R. Ervin Taylor Jr., professor of anthropology at University of California, Riverside, results using accelerator mass spectrometry determined the actual age of the Calaveras fossils to be around 720 years (with an error factor of 200 years in either direction). As skeptics had long predicted, the pranksters behind the hoax probably dug them out of a Native burial ground originally and planted them in a site where they were likely to be found.
"Our results bolts the door and turns the lock on the skull being anything but a relatively recent Native American," Dr. Taylor said in a 1986 media interview. Though he acknowledged that nobody today really believed the skull was genuine, formally dating the skull represents a "historical footnote" to a bizarre and little-known episode in the history of science. Still, while the Piltdown Man fraud remains the most well-known hoax of its kind, the case of the Calaveras skull poses important lessons for researchers as well.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't.
Comments