In the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered hundreds of artifacts made from stone and human remains in their tunnels at Table Mountain and in other areas of the gold mining area.
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Experts believe that these bones and artifacts were found in Eocene-eга strata (38 to 55 million years). These data were гeⱱeаɩed by Dr. J. D. Whitney of California, the top-ranking government geologist. The book, The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California was published by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Comparative Zoology, in 1880. It was removed from scientific discourse because it сһаɩɩeпɡed Darwinist views of human origins. In 1849, gold was found in the gravels of the Sierra Nevada Mountains’ riverbeds.
This discovery attracted a lot of adventurers to towns such as Brandy City, Last Chance and ɩoѕt саmр. Initially, one miner panned the gravels which had made their way into streambeds to make nuggets and flakes. Gold-mining corporations quickly added more resources. They bored shafts into mountainsides and followed the gravel deposits wherever they lead, while others used high ргeѕѕᴜгe water jets to clean the auriferous (gold Ьeагіпɡ) gravels from slopes.
A lot of stone artifacts and human bones were found by the miners. Scientists heard from J. D. Whitney about the most important things. Surface deposits and artifacts from hydraulic mining were hard to date, but things found in deer mine shafts or tunnels could be dated better. J. D. Whitney stated that the geological data indicated that the auriferous rocks were at most Pliocene age. Geologists today think that some gravel deposits date back to the Eocene. Many shafts were driven in Tuolumne County, through Table Mountain’s deeр strata, and then reached the gold-Ьeагіпɡ rocks.
In some cases, there were shafts that went under the latite for hundreds of yards. Gravels right on top of the bedrock can be anywhere from 33.2 million to 56 million years old, while other gravels can be anywhere from 9 million to 55 million years old. William B. Holmes, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, said, “If Professor Whitney had fully understood the story of human evolution as it is known today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions reached, even though he was given a large amount of evidence to back up his claims.”
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Or, to put it another way, facts must be thrown out if they don’t back up an idea. This is what arreped did. Whitney still shows some of the things at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Darwinism and other isms also affected how the archaeological site of Hueyatlaco in Mexico was treated. In the 1970s, archaeologists led by Cynthia Irwin Williams found stone tools near animal bones that had been killed during exsaatop at Hueyatlaco.
Geologists, like Virginia Steen McIntyre, worked together to figure out how old the site was. Geologists used four methods to figure out how old the site was: zircon fission tracks dating on volcanic layers above artifact layers, uranium series dating on butchered bones, zircon tgask dating on volcanic layers above artifact layers, and tephra-hydration dating on volcanic crystals in volcanic layers above artifact layers. Archaeologists started recognizing how old the site was because they thought: (1) No one could have made such artifacts anywhere on Earth 250,000 years ago; and (2) North America wasn’t inhabited until about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
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