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]
In the days of Queen Victoria scientists were sometimes as extravagant in their claims for early man in the Americas as the fundamentalists were absurd in their attacks upon him. Fiorino Ameghino, a museum director of Buenos Aires, got a hearing for what he called evidences of Argentine man in an age when the mammals had only just reached ascendancy. He made his initial discovery at nineteen; that was in 1873. For forty or fifty years he went on making find after find and raising controversy after controversy. The fossilized bones of man and mammal that he discovered at nineteen he placed in the Pliocene Epoch, prior to the Great Ice Age; geologists claimed that the stratum where he made his finds is of the Ice Age or later. Much the same criticism applied to most of Ameghino’s discoveries. He set up four primitive types of early man, based on the discovery of various bones, and placed the first in the Miocene Epoch more than fifteen million years ago. The geologists again put his strata in the Glacial period. Anthropologists and paleontologists were quite as annoyed as the geologists when Ameghino made Argentina the center from which all human and mammalian forms spread over the world.
Yet, in spite of Ameghino’s extravagant claims and others that were somewhat less extravagant, belief in early man persisted and grew. There was considerable stir when, between 1872 and 1899, C. C. Abbott and others discovered some primitive stone implements[7] (see illustration, page 144), parts of a human thigh-bone, jaw, and skull, in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey. There were more finds at other sites, and by 1890 it was generally conceded by scientists that man had invaded the Americas during or close to the time of the last glaciers. The Protestant church subsided into a quietude which was not to be broken until the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925.