The three finds of complete skeletons made in Minnesota between 1931 and 1935 have aroused much debate. All three were encountered in road-making or the digging of gravel, and scientists were not present at their discovery. A. E. Jenks’s study of these skeletons has done much to clarify them.[23] “Minnesota man”—really a girl—was found in a geological stratum marked by varves, or thin layers of clay, laid down in successive years by a glacial lake about 11,000 years ago. Antevs believes her body was thrust into this stratum at a later time; but other geological authorities, including Kirk Bryan, Paul MacClintock, G. F. Kay, and M. M. Leighton, deny it and present rather convincing evidence.[24] Hooton unhesitatingly expresses the opinion that “this discovery establishes a very strong probability, though not an absolute certainty, of the existence of _Homo sapiens_ in the New World in Late Glacial times.”[25] Artifacts found with the skeleton—including part of a knife made from an antler—do not give us a radiocarbon date. In the gravel of Browns Valley, where the second skeleton was found, there were also spear points (see illustration, page 158). From geological evidence connected with this find—the most generally accepted of the three in Minnesota—a date between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago seems plausible. The third skeleton, Sauk Valley man, has been the center of much dispute. Some geologists believe that the depth of the occurrence and the presence of a certain sand within the skull argue a considerable antiquity. Like the owner of the Punin skull, “Minnesota man” had a primitive type of teeth, larger even than those of some Old World paleolithic specimens. Jenks and L. A. Wilford find twenty-six archaic traits in the Sauk Valley skull.[26] Thousands of years before the elephants and the men of our three-ring circuses took up winter quarters in Florida a different kind of elephant and a different kind of man seem to have come into contact there along the Indian River. It was a very firm contact indeed; for, if evidence dug up at Melbourne in 1925 means anything, it means that a mammoth or a mastodon stepped on the skull of some variety of early man and left it flat as a pancake. Other elephants and a goodly array of mammals that are now extinct left some of their bones in the same geologic formation with the skull. Ten years before, other such fossils and an even more mutilated skull had been found in the same kind of stratum forty miles away at Vero Beach.