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Petroglyphs visible at Little Petroglyph Canyon, or Renegade Canyon, in California. Source: Terry Feuerborn / CC BY-NC 2.0

Remarkable Rock Art at California’s Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons

Within the Mojave Desert, in southeastern California, those interested in ancient rock art are in for a treat. Hidden on a military base is an area with thousands of documented Native American...
Steven Haddock viewing a mammoth tusk on a screen on the Western Flyer, an MBARI research vessel. Source: Darrin Schultz / MBARI

Why Is This Mammoth Tusk In Deep Water Off the Californian Coast?

A 100,000-year-old mammoth tusk has been discovered by a robot more than 10,000 feet below sea level. But rather than in Arctic wastes, where they’re usually found, this one was uncovered in the...
First Americans, photo of mural in the Page Museum, Los Angeles, by Travis S (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Chumash: The Seashell First People Of North America

The question of how people first came to North America is as complicated as when they arrived. With new evidence comes new theories and the dates are being revised constantly. While the colonization...
General Sherman, the world’s largest tree (Jim Bahn/CC BY 2.0), has been wrapped in a fireproof blanket. (Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks)

The World’s Largest Tree Might Go Up In Smoke

The largest measured tree in the world is a 275-foot (83.8 meter) sequoia known as General Sherman. Estimated at being 2,000 or 3,000 years old, the tree grows in the Sequoia National Park’s Giant...
Fort Ross – When Russians Colonized North America

Fort Ross – When Russians Colonized North America

Fort Ross was a Russian-American Company settlement in California which was built during the 19th century. This settlement represents the southernmost extent of the Russian colonisation of North...
Mount Shasta: Sacred Mountain and a Strange Destination for Many

Mount Shasta: Mystery Mountain and Sacred Destination

Mount Shasta is not the tallest or most beautiful mountain in the Cascade Range; but it is the most legendary. In terms of weirdness and strangeness, the unusual stories surrounding the mountain will...
California Park Ranger Discovers Massive Cache of Miocene Epoch Fossils

California Park Ranger Discovers Massive Cache of Miocene Epoch Fossils

Paleontologists excavating a site in northern California have unearthed one of the largest and most astonishing collections of Miocene fossils ever discovered in the state. Dating to the Miocene...
Chumash Cash: The Saucers That Formed America’s First Economy

Chumash Cash: The Saucers That Formed America’s First Economy

A Californian researcher who studied tens of thousands of shells decorated by indigenous Chumash hunter-gatherers, has pushed back the origins of “cash” in the U.S. by over one thousand years. Dr...
Magic Flowers of U.S. Dream Trippers Found at California’s Pinwheel Cave

Magic Flowers of U.S. Dream Trippers Found at California’s Pinwheel Cave

When you think of psychedelics and the United States, famous psychonauts like Timothy Leary, Gerry Garcia and Jim Morrison come to mind. In the 1991 movie, The Doors , Jim Morrison got seriously...
Chumash cave paintings at Painted Cave in the mountains above Santa Barbara

The Colors of the Wind: Hidden Messages of the Chumash Cave Paintings

Take a moment, and close your eyes. Breathe deeply, and inhale the salt of the air and feel the light brush of low-hanging tree branches caressing your face. Feel the rocky ground beneath your toes,...
Mount Shasta

Mount Shasta: Spirits and Danger on a Sacred California Mountain

Mount Shasta, located near the Oregon border in northern California, holds the distinction of being one of the world’s preeminent sacred mountains. It is recognized as an eligible Native American...
Deriv. Image of Native American woman, believed to be Juana Maria, of the Nicoleño tribe

Juana Maria, the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island

Island of the Blue Dolphins is a book written by the American author Scott O’Dell about a girl stranded on an island in the Pacific. This popular children’s novel is based on a real story of a woman...
Pomo Tule Canoe (Edward Curtis).

Stone Hatchet Man & The Troubling Unfinished Journeys to the Spirit World for Native American Bones

It was July of 1923, and a hot day in Clearlake Park, California. Charles Hesse had been excavating a pit for his new septic tank all morning. Just before lunch, Charlie dug a good-sized, waist deep...
A concentration of bone and rock at the Cerutti Mastodon site in California, USA.

Criticisms Mount Against Claim of Hominins in the Americas Over 100,000 Years Ago

A startling claim was made almost a year ago: researchers said that they had evidence of hominins in the Americas at least 100,000 years before most people believed. They called for open-minded...
Bigfoot in the Patterson-Gimlin Film.

Why the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film Should Concern Scholars of Human Origins

The anthropological sciences occasionally have to deal with something which has a profound but unexpected impact on our understanding of human origins. Two events are noteworthy, in part because both...
The base of the ‘President’, Oldest living sequoia.

Not the Biggest, Not the Tallest, Not the Widest - So What Makes this Giant Sequoia The ‘President’?

‘President’ is the name given to a giant sequoia located in the Sequoia National Park, USA. According to measurements taken by researchers, President is the second largest tree in the world. Even...
The unbroken mastodon ribs and vertebrae, including one vertebra with a large well preserved neural spine.

History Rewritten! Early Humans were in North America 130,000 Years Ago

An amazing find at an Ice Age site in San Diego, California may dramatically alter the accepted timeline for when early humans first reached North America. 130,000-year-old bones and teeth of a...
The Ghost Ships of San Francisco: Dozens of Wrecks Buried Beneath City Streets

The Ghost Ships of San Francisco: Dozens of Wrecks Buried Beneath City Streets

There is a graveyard of ships under the city of San Francisco, California. These ships date to the middle of the 19th century, when the California Gold Rush occurred. Many ships that came to San...
An imaginary depiction of the remains of a stranded Viking ship.

A Ship in the Desert? Searching for a Lost Viking Ship in California

Back in the days when much of the map was still blank, explorers would follow any waterway in the hopes of finding the next great passage. Yet some rivers can be deceiving, especially those in the...
Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part 4 – Investigating the Castle Crags Petroglyphs

Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part 4 – Investigating the Castle Crags Petroglyphs

In the previous articles about Mount Shasta's J.C. Brown mystery, we explored the prehistoric lore of the area, which at face-value could suggest that Brown's claim of discovering a cave containing...
Deriv; Dramatic view from Mount Saint Helena, California (CC BY-SA 4.0), and photo of a Pomo native in a tule boat, circa 1924.

Ancient Age: The Coming of the Amerindians

A hundred and forty million years ago, Lake County, a part of Northern California, began with another of the ear-splitting rumbles that were a part of a continuing grand archaeological planet-wide...
Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part 3 – Prehistoric Traditions of Giants and Mysterious Beings, Part Two

Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part 3 – Prehistoric Traditions of Giants and Mysterious Beings, Part Two

[Read Part I] When I began to research the J.C. Brown mystery, I suspected that if any element of Brown’s story was true, there might be something in the historical record–or prehistoric lore of the...
Mount Shasta, Photograph © Dustin Naef 2016

Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part 3 – Prehistoric Traditions of Giants and Mysterious Beings, Part One

There are countless Native American legends describing prehistoric giants, flood myths, lost civilizations, cataclysms, the star people, and other mysterious beings who belonged to some remote and...
“Full moon rising over Mount Shasta, as seen from northern valley.”

Mount Shasta: Inner Earth Realms and History of the Lava Beds

There are legends all over the world, found in every culture, which populate caves with spirits and supernatural guardians who dwell in a subterranean realm hidden just beneath surface of our own...

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