Of the many conflicts and controversies, the most celebrated raged around the Calaveras skull. Except for the fact that in this case the churchmen seem to have been right and the scientists wrong, it was characteristic of most of the disputes over early man. Fittingly enough, the skull was found in the California county which Mark Twain made famous about the same time by his own discovery of the celebrated jumping frog. There is no question that a mine operator with a reputation for veracity far superior to Mark Twain’s Truthful James found the thing in a shaft 130 feet below the surface. There is also no question that the skull, with its heavy brow ridges, was fossilized and encrusted with the kind of gravel that distinguishes California mines. Unfortunately, the skull proved too much—or seemed to. It lay under four strata of lava and three of gold-bearing gravels, and therefore belonged at the very least to the Pliocene period which ended some million years ago—unless, of course, a practical joker had salted the mine. Some scientists accepted the skull. Some preachers and religious editors were content with evidence from Holy Writ, but most of them preferred the practical joke argument. Various wits and various victims were involved, but the most popular explanation held that the mine operator was known as an agnostic, and that certain miners thought it would be amusing to plant faked evidence for him to embrace—which presumes a considerable amount of churchly enthusiasm in the miners of Calaveras County. Science asked where the miners could have got so ancient and fossilized a skull, and a few scientists and a good many Protestants replied that the name of the county had come from the Spanish word for skulls _calaveras_ because whole skeletons and “uneasy crania” were constantly turning up in its soil and its river beds. The controversy raged through the 1870’s and gained new vigor in 1880, when J. D. Whitney, a leading geologist of his day and director of the California Geological Survey, brought out _Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California_. In the fourteen years since the discovery of the skull, Whitney had studied the region thoroughly and gathered data from everyone who remembered the circumstances of the find. He concluded that the skull had been discovered _in situ_, and had not been planted. Some twenty-five years later, when the religious fury of the attacks had subsided, Aleš Hrdlička produced craniums from the caves of California that were quite as fossilized as the Calaveras skull and showed the same heavy brow ridges. He had to admit, however, that the ridges of the Calaveras skull extended clear across the eyes and nose—“a much less common form.”[6]