hat do you seek in uncertain times? I believe it is a measure of assurance obtainable only by prognostication. I aim to satisfy this by three means.

First by calling to the stand as witnesses certain bones. The testimony of the bones!

Recently I visited the site of a remarkable find. It was in a shady glen, a grotto carved out into the bank of San Francisquito Creek, about fifteen feet below the street level, not far from the original residence of Senator Stanford (a contemporary of mine who bought much of the land flanking the creek in the 1880s, a time when my great real estate speculation had dissolved into a fiasco and I was recovering from that blow by writing  my famous book on Atlantis[1]) There has subsequently been been at least two skulls found at this same location. The first in early 1922, in April or May, by a student named Bruce Seymore. He found the skull sticking out of those gravels  about 6 feet above the ground. This young man took the skull to Professor Willis of the geology department who after returning to the creek to photograph the skull at the point of its discovery, advised a friend of his, Doctor Alex Hrdlicka, of the National Museum. 

My Dear Doctor Hrdlicka: Although it is more than 12 years since you and I rejuvenated an ancient man in South America, you are, I notice, still interested in our older inhabitants and I would, therefore, call your attention to a skull, which we have recently found in the alluvial gravels of this immediate vicinity...
 

Soon after the doctor wrote back saying that he thought that the skull was probably not much older than ten thousand years, humans of those days being at best very scarce on the continent. Professor Willis had judged that the geological deposits in which the skull was found were more than four thousand years old. Considering the extreme difficulty of absolute dating in those days, these estimates, bracketing it between four and ten thousand years old, are remarkably good, as subsequent events were to show.[2]

In the spring of 1963 part of a human vertabra was exposed on the other side of the creek, nearby, at a depth of sixteen and a half feet. The skeleton was excavated by Stanford University Professor Bert Gerow and some students who discovered it to be a young man who had been buried oriented North seventy degrees east along with three arrowheads of Monterey chert, two rodent incisors, an eccentric pebble of probable marine origin, and a fragment of the milk canine of a large carnivore, probably a bear. There was enough charcoal to date the burial at 4350 and 4400 radiocarbon years before present. Depth of burial was sixteen feet below the level of the present ground. 

3000 BC [3]. A thousand six hundred years before the fall of Troy! 

[1] Donnelly, Atlantis, 1882 
[2] One senses that an objective of this academic interest was to demonstrate the antiquity of man, thus denying the prospect of special creation. See Gerow for background on these finds. 
[3] Radiocarbon years are subject to correction (add 600 years in this age range) to attain our conventional calendar years, which I shall here set forth in the traditional BC/AD form. 
[4]Note the stratigraphic position of the skull at the point indicated as being 5840 BP.