Along the coast of California to the north, other narrow skulls with
heavy brow ridges have been found in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara
and the Channel Islands and from just east of San Francisco to
Sacramento. Some consider the Oak Grove specimens from Santa Barbara the
oldest, but until 1946 most anthropologists were not inclined to give
any of them more than 4,000 years. Now, however, nine skeletons have
been found near Concord which will probably move all the California
skulls of this type a few thousand years farther back. These skulls,
from what is called the Monument Site, were under four feet of earth
which the soil experts of the neighboring University of California
believe took anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 years to accumulate and
weather.[30] Through shell ornaments in the burials, Robert F. Heizer
identifies the Monument skulls with what is called the Middle Central
California culture found near the capital of the state.[31] This culture
lay above Early Central California, and the skulls of the latter were
found in and beneath four feet of cementlike hardpan.[32] Heizer
estimates the age of these early men “in the neighborhood of 4,000 to
5,000 years,” but he states that “a number of soil chemists,
geomorphologists, and geologists who have seen our Early horizon sites
have suggested an antiquity in the neighborhood of 10,000 years.”[33]
The Monument Site seems to argue that the latter figure is not
impossible. Even this date gives us no glacial age for early man in
California, but here again we have skulls that are older and more
archaic in type than those of the Mongoloid Indian. They have some
features of the skulls from Florida and South America that have been
found with the fossils of extinct mammals.
In 1949 Heizer unearthed, not a skull, but the record of a skull that
had been found in 1922 embedded in four to five feet of gravel now
considered “early Recent.” The gravel and sixteen or twenty feet of silt
above it formed the bank of a creek near Stanford University. The skull
is long and narrow,[34] and is fossilized enough to suggest a
respectable antiquity.
The year 1947 presented us, at last, with an early skull that seemed as
if it could be dated pretty accurately without the aid of elephants. Yet
without their aid it might never have been found.
Evidence from Middle America
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