ANCIENT RELICS OF STATE SHOWN
Museum Exhibit Earliest Remains of Prehistoric Inhabitants of San Francisco
A new permanent exhibit showing the earliest remains of the prehistoric inhabitants of San Francisco will be opened to-day at the University of California Museum of Anthropology at the Affiliated Colleges. It is the California Shellmound Exhibit. In it there have been brought together implements, bones and relics of the bygone centuries, from so remote a period that even tradition fails to record their origin.
The specimens are the fruit of eleven years of excavations by parties from the University of California and were obtained in many different shellmounds on various parts of San Francisco bay. More than four hundred of these ancient village sites once lined the shores of the bay, and from this number the accumulations at San Rafael, Richmond, Emeryville, Sausalito, San Mateo and Palo Alto, as well as Hunter's Point within the city limits, have gradually yielded up their contents before the systematic digging of the anthropologists. The specimens shown in the exhibit are only the cream of the collection, the bulk of which remains stored in the museum basement.
The most careful computations place the age of the older and larger shellmounds at over 3,000 years. The people who built them were, therefore, flourishing where San Francisco now stands at the time Solomon built his temple and the Greeks sacked Troy.
A population of 12,000 to 15,000, dense according to aboriginal standards, is estimated to have inhabIted the bay counties at that period. That this primitive people was of Asiatic origin is considered probable, but not yet proved.
Bodily sections of shellmounds and buried skeletons have been brought to the museum,
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