Some of the Calaveras skull hoax stories were propagated by scientists such as William H. Holmes, anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution.  Upon examining the actual Calaveras skull at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he concluded that "the skull was never carried and broken in a Tertiary torrent, that it never came from the old gravels in the Mattison mine, and that it does not in any way represent a Tertiary race of men." 
   Holmes also discredited Whitney's dating of anomalous stone tools discovered at the California gold mines, asserting they were from the local Digger Indians.  One might ask why Holmes and others were so determined to discredit Whitney's evidence for the existence of Teritary humans.  The following statement by Holmes provides an essential clue: "If these forms are really of Tertiary origin, we have here one of the greatest marvels yet encountered by science; and perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood to-day, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted."  In other words, if the facts do not fit the favored theory, the facts, even an imposing array of them, must go.