Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/706

 holmes] A URIFEROUS GRA VEL MAN 637

Wyman has nothing more startling to say than that " in so far as it differs in dimensions from the other crania from California, it approaches the Esquimaux." This vague variation is just as likely to be an individual peculiarity as a racial character. It need not be regarded as strange that the skull should be superior to the average 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 antiquity.

Professor Whitney lays much stress upon the fact that the specimen is undoubtedly a fossil. " Chemical analysis proves that it was not taken from the surface, but that it was dug up somewhere, from some place where it had been long deposited, and where it had undergone those chemical changes which, so far as known, do not take place in objects buried near the surface." If there was a trick on the part of fun-loving miners, " they must themselves," he adds, " have obtained from somewhere the object thus used ; and as all the diggings in the vicinity are in gravels intercalated between volcanic strata, it becomes, really, a matter of but little consequence, from a geological point of view, from whose shaft the skull was taken." l It would appear that Whitney failed to notice that although the gravels were originally wholly intercalated with strata of volcanic materials, they have been ex- posed in many places by the erosion of valleys, that they outcrop on the hillsides and lie uncovered in the valleys, and that any of the modern tribes may have buried their dead in previously un- disturbed Tertiary river gravels. I learned of more than one

1 Auriferous Gravels \ p. 271.

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