Historedia
Episode 1 of 3

Discovery Claim

When
1866-02-25
Where
Calaveras County, California
Part of
Discovery of the Calaveras Skull and its exposure as a hoax

Miners claimed to find a human skull beneath lava in a mine in Calaveras County, California.

On February 25, 1866, miners reported finding a human skull 130 feet below the surface, beneath a layer of lava. This claim was used to support the idea of Pliocene human existence.

Sources

  1. Calaveras Skull Wikipedia, revision of 2026-01-08

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.