The Melbourne Man Skull (1925) — Melbourne, Florida

Melbourne Man is the name attached to a crushed human skull found in July 1925 beside Crane Creek on the west side of Melbourne. According to Florida Tech News, the skull belonged to an adult female, and James Gidley of the Smithsonian suggested it had been stepped on by a mastodon or mammoth. It came out of the same sandy layer as the bones of mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths and other extinct Ice Age animals, which is why it mattered.

The find sat at the center of a scientific argument rather than a settled conclusion. Gidley and his partner Frederic Loomis of Amherst College contended that the Melbourne remains proved people and late Pleistocene megafauna lived together in Florida 15,000 to 25,000 years ago. Leading anthropologists disputed the age of the human bones. The Florida Museum of Natural History describes the idea that human remains at the Melbourne, Vero and Seminole Field sites were as old as the fossil animals as very controversial at the time and not endorsed by the mainstream archaeological community.

The story starts with a grove owner. The Florida Museum records that fossils in the Melbourne area were discovered by local resident C. P. Singleton and reported to the Smithsonian Institution in 1922. Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson writes that workers had uncovered a deposit of bones along a stream bed near where Singleton planned a citrus grove, and that Gidley talked Loomis, who was passing through Washington on a Florida holiday, into a detour to Melbourne.

Loomis spent six weeks working the low ground beside the stream and the nearby hammock. In December 1923, while excavating two mammoth skeletons about a mile and a half west of downtown Melbourne, he recovered stone artifacts and bones that appeared to be modified by people, lying with the mammoth remains. Patterson notes a rough flint implement shaped like an arrowhead found inside a mammoth ribcage. Loomis published the finds in 1924 and wrote that the Melbourne evidence convinced him people had lived alongside the mammoth, mastodon, horse and camel.

One of the Crane Creek mammoths traveled north. The Florida Museum says the skeleton was restored and mounted at Amherst College and is very likely the first mounted skeleton of a fossil from Florida placed on public display in a museum. It stands today in the Beneski Museum of Natural History.

In July 1925 the Smithsonian and Amherst College sent a joint expedition to Melbourne. The Florida Museum states that the primary goal was to determine if the human artifacts and remains were Pleistocene in age. A lantern slide in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, believed to have been taken by Gidley that summer, carries a record that Loomis, Singleton and Gidley spent six weeks carefully excavating three local sites.

The richest of the three, the Golf Course locality, lay on the east bank of Crane Creek where the creek crossed the Melbourne Golf and Country Club, south of West New Haven Avenue. The Florida Museum gives its extent as at least 100 feet long and about 30 feet wide. A second locality sat about a mile south southwest in Singleton's orange grove, and a third, less productive site lay on the south bank of channelized Crane Creek about a mile west of the golf course. The fossils came from a brown sand known in the 1920s literature as Bed 2, four to five feet thick, which rests on shelly sand and is topped by layers Gidley read as a swamp deposit.

The Florida Museum credits the team with very careful work for its time, especially in recording the stratigraphic position of each bone, because Gidley and Loomis knew about the dispute over human bones found a decade earlier at Vero. The crushed skull came out of this 1925 season. On July 12, 1925, Singleton hosted a dinner for the visiting scientists at the newly opened Melbourne Hotel downtown.

Three days after Christmas in 1925, Gidley presented the Melbourne finds to the Paleontological Society in New Haven, Connecticut. Florida Tech News recounts that anthropologists meeting nearby, led by Ales Hrdlicka, came to the session and argued that Gidley had overestimated the age of the human remains. The quarrel between anthropologists and paleontologists over Melbourne ran for more than a generation.

The two sides disagreed on a specific point. Loomis reported that the Melbourne flint implement lay in the same layer as the extinct animals, and Gidley treated the skull the same way, as evidence that people and megafauna shared the Crane Creek landscape. The anthropologists did not accept that the human remains were that old. The Florida Museum adds a second layer of disagreement: before 1950, paleontologists also argued over whether the Melbourne, Vero and Seminole Field sites were early or late Pleistocene.

The Melbourne case was never closed by its discoverer. Gidley returned to Melbourne in 1926, 1928, 1929 and 1930, but died in 1931 before publishing his findings. In 1946 T. D. Stewart published a re-examination of the fossil human skeletal remains from Melbourne, listed in the Florida Tech article's references. Today the Florida Museum estimates the Melbourne fauna at about 11,000 to 25,000 years old from the animals present, a figure for the fossil bed rather than a direct date on the skull.

Vero, the comparison case in Indian River County, did get a modern answer. The Florida Museum's Vero Canal page reports that geochemical work in 2012 and controlled excavations in 2014 showed humans did coexist with extinct megafauna there. The sources reviewed for this page do not describe a comparable modern re-study of the Melbourne skull, so its age remains a matter of the historical record and the debate rather than a settled result.

For paleontologists the site matters well beyond the skull. The Florida Museum's Seminole Field account names Melbourne in Brevard County as one of the Big Three late Pleistocene sites found in Florida in the first half of the 20th century, together with Vero in Indian River County and Seminole Field in Pinellas County. The Vero Canal page says Melbourne soon surpassed Vero, producing more specimens and many of higher quality.

Gidley's list through the 1926 season counted 36 species of mammals (excluding human), 7 reptiles, one fish and 4 birds from the Melbourne sites. The full faunal list includes mammoth, mastodon, dire wolf, saber cat, giant beaver, tapir, llama, horse and bison. One small find had an unusual afterlife: a bat jaw from Melbourne described in 1932 as a new genus is now assigned to Eumops floridanus, a species once thought extinct that still lives in southernmost Florida.

Study of the Crane Creek material has been slowed by geography. Singleton kept digging the Golf Course locality from 1925 to at least 1928, apparently with Harvard funding, so the Melbourne collection is divided among the Smithsonian, Amherst College and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The ground has been absorbed into the modern city. Patterson places the three sites in what are now the Florida Tech Botanical Garden and the Crane Creek Reserve Golf Course, and he notes collecting fossils with students in the stream bed through the garden in the early 1980s. The Florida Museum observes that many more such sites likely lie undiscovered under Florida's developed coastline.

Not every Melbourne specimen survived. The first mammoth skeleton went on display in a small museum inside the Melbourne Hotel, built in 1924 after the 1919 Front Street fire, and Florida Tech News reports there is no record of what became of it. The second Melbourne mammoth still stands at Amherst, where the college adopted the mammoth as its mascot in 2017.