Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  When the prominent Basel physician Felix Plater was called to Lucerne in 1584 to care for the ailing colonel Ludwig Pfyffer, he expected to spend his spare time collecting rare plants on the neighboring mountains and visiting with his friend Renward Cysat. He was successful on all counts. The colonel recovered, Plater gathered more than a hundred samples of plants unknown to him, and Cysat had a special treat for him: mysterious bones. His friend explained that seven years earlier, a tremendous storm had buffeted the village of Reyden, a village that Plater had passed through on his way to Lucern. When the brothers of the local monastery came out to inspect the damage, they found that an ancient oak on Kommende Hill had been knocked over. Tangled among its roots were the large bones that Cysat now showed him. Many of the bones were damaged and only a few fragments of the skull remained. Naturally, the workmen were blamed for mishandling them. Plater convinced the city council to let him take them back to Basel for study. From the long bones of the arms and legs and, especially, a digit that appeared to be a thumb, Plater felt confident in telling the Lucerners that they had the remains of a human giant. By his calculations, it stood fourteen strich tall (nineteen feet) in life. Since giants were not part of any local traditions, he believed that it must have lived and died during some prehistoric era before normal humans arrived in the mountains.

  Plater hired Hans Boch, an artist who happened to be painting his portrait at the time, to prepare large drawings of the bones and an imaginative drawing of the giant as it must have appeared in life. In Boch’s reconstruction, the giant stands with one hand on a dead tree, perhaps an oak like the one he was found under, naked except for a laurel and a girdle of oak leaves. Despite Plater’s conclusion that the giant and normal people had never lived together, Boch included a Swiss pikeman, gaping in awe at the giant, for comparison. The Lucerners were delighted, both with Plater’s conclusions and with Boch’s drawings. The bones were put on display in the city hall and the giant was made the shield-bearer of the city’s coat of arms. They had him painted on a tower attached to the city hall with a poem telling the story of his discovery. That wasn’t the end of the giant’s fame. In the next century, Cysat and members of the city council decided to decorate the three footbridges that connected the two parts of the city across the Reuss River. They hired an artist to paint triangular panels to be hung inside the bridges, attached to the roof trusses. Prominent citizens were encouraged to sponsor panels and in return, their crests would be incorporated into the paintings. Cysat bought panel number one on the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke). For the subject, he chose Boch’s giant along with a poem that he composed. Later, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher adapted Boch’s drawing to illustrate the relative sizes of famous giants. In his well-known version, six smaller giants stand in the shadow of Boccaccio’s titan. All seven have the posture and attire of Boch’s giant. The Reyden giant stands next to Goliath as the second smallest. Habicot was twenty-seven when the tree in Reyden was blown over and was quite familiar with the conclusions of the Swiss doctor.

  The Renaissance and Reformation brought with them strong intellectual challenges to the historical reality of giants and equally strong defenses of it. Plater and Cysat’s embrace of the giant of Reyden amounted to taking sides in an emerging debate. It was impossible for either Protestants or Catholics to come right out and say that the Bible was wrong about giants, even if they secretly believed it. The challengers crouched their arguments in terms of certain passages in the Bible needing to be read as allegory. The giants of old, they wrote, were giants in deed (good or evil) rather than giants in stature. When Theodore Zwinger wrote in 1565 that “although Scripture [uses the word giants], theologians nevertheless prefer to interpret these passages allegorically,” he was ahead of his time by a good century. No such consensus existed. One year earlier, a work was published by the poet and military engineer Girolamo Maggi (using the Latinized name Hieronymus Magius) in which the author struggled with ways to reconcile the evidence and non-evidence of giants and the aging of the earth. On the one hand were the authoritative writings of the Bible and respected authors of antiquity. On the other hand were the results of his personal research. He had examined Roman and Etruscan tombs and weapons from the Punic Wars, almost two thousand years earlier, and found them to be no bigger than those of his day. Maggi began by reasoning that many ancient accounts were exaggerated; certainly, there had been giants, just not really gigantic giants. Next, he took a rather creative approach to the doctrine of the decline of the world by suggesting that the loss of vitality didn’t happen at a consistent rate in all places and times. Thus, there could still be large numbers of extraordinarily large people in China and Patagonia while the Italians had remained the same size for the last two millennia.

  The first unqualified denial of giants came at the end of the decade from the pen of the Flemish physician Jan van Gorp (Joannes Goropius Becanus) in his book Origins Antwerpianae. According to a popular legend, the future site of his city had once held a bridge across the River Scheldt guarded by a giant named Druon Antigoon. If anyone refused to pay their toll he would chop off one of their hands as payment and throw it in the river. He continued this unpopular practice until the arrival of a Roman soldier named Brabo who chopped off one of Antigoon’s hands and tossed it into the river while the giant bled to death. Brabo then became the namesake of the province of Brabant and the city that grew up next to the bridge took the name Antwerp from the Flemish words “hand werpen” which roughly translates as “hand tossing.” The part of the story that Gorp took issue with was the meaning of the word “giant.” Much of his work involved the construction of elaborate and fanciful etymologies. During his researches, he had been amazed to discover that the dialect of Flemish spoken around his home in Antwerp was the exact same language that had been spoken by Adam and Eve in Eden. This made it the oldest and most noble language on earth. It escaped the confusion of the languages at Babel because the tribe of Gomer, the ancestors of the Flemish, had already trekked off to Northern Europe by the time the tower was allegedly built four thousand years before his time. It had remained pure and unchanged during all those centuries. Through linguistic contortions, he proved that the Latin word gigant, was a contraction of the Flemish wijt gehant which he gave the meaning of qui manus habet longe lateque extensas [He has his hands stretched far and wide]. The name of the antediluvian giants in Genesis, Nephilim, comes from the Hebrew word naphal which he said was a cognate of the Flemish word val meaning “downfall.” From this, he concluded that the word “giant” had originally been used to describe a people who were in rebellion against God and who were punished for it. Large bones that had been found in the vicinity of Antwerp, he dismissed as nothing more than the bones of elephants brought north by the Romans or perhaps sea monsters that had gotten lost and swum up the river.

  Though Gorp was not the first to propose an allegorical interpretation of ancient giants, the blunt and uncompromising nature of his attack demanded a response. Several were written at the time and continued to be argued over the next half century. Even Sir Walter Raleigh, who spent his time while in the Tower of London writing a history of the world, felt compelled to write a defense of giants. Jean Chassanion wrote an entire book to refute Gorp. Chassanion tried to overwhelm Gorp with an appeal to authority and the sheer volume of his evidence. His book was primarily the standard list of giants from the Bible and esteemed ancient writers and well known recent discoveries, such as the giant of Erice, supplemented by a few previously unmentioned giants that he uncovered in his research, including a giant tooth that he had seen with his own eyes. The book went through three editions. Chassanion did make one departure from his predecessors; he did not keep the theme of the decay of the world. His giants were departures from normal humanity, which had always been the size of modern men.

  This was the state of European thought on giants when Mazurier picked up his bones and departed Paris, leaving Habicot the job of defending Theutobochus.

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p; The response to Habicot came in December, just before the end of the year, in the form of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Gigantomachie pour respondre à la Gigantostologie (Gigantomachie, a response to Gygantosteologie). The author was given as “a Student in Medicine” but everyone knew it was Jean Riolan, an influential member of the guild of physicians and son of a famous anatomist of the same name. Riolan never indicates that he saw the bones. His arguments are entirely directed at Habicot’s pamphlet. On the question of giants in general, Riolan matches citations of respected authorities of antiquity who argued for the reality of giants with his own list of respected authorities of antiquity who argued against the reality of giants. As to the identification of the bones as those of Theutobochus, he states that this is either a fraud or a credulous mistake on Habicot’s part. Riolan is at his strongest when he delves into the purely anatomical details of Habicot’s identification. After a lengthy and pedantic section focusing on the number of bones in the human body, he gets to the meat of the matter; the measurements that Habicot provides do not match the proportions of a normal human body. The skull is too big and the chest is too deep to fit with the named height of the skeleton. He concludes that the bones must have come from an elephant. Although he, like Habicot, admits he has never seen one, he thinks the bones are roughly the right size according to some descriptions he has read. Riolan does not limit himself to responding to Habicot’s arguments or to advancing new ones related to questions surrounding the bones. He attacks Habicot’s competence as an anatomist, the value of his previous works, his style as a writer, and even his spelling. He frequently throws out the words “ignorant,” “ridiculous,” and “inept.” Not satisfied to go after Habicot himself, Riolan expands his attacks to the entire guild of barber-surgeons and to its most famous practitioner, Ambroise Paré. Paré was considered one of the titans of French surgery and had been Habicot’s teacher, making this an especially bitter line of attack. Even his pseudonym “a Student in Medicine” is an insult; it carries the message that even a novice should see how wrong Habicot is.

  Why was Riolan such a jerk? The medical professions in seventeenth-century France were bitterly divided. Physicians, barber-surgeons, and apothecaries each had their own guilds and jealously guarded their prerogatives. Outside the guilds, tooth pullers, bone setters, midwives, and oculists also practiced professionally, though with a lower social status. Paris was the center of education in France and both the physicians and barber-surgeons had schools there. The University of Montpellier, where the doctors had authenticated the bones, had its own school of medicine that competed with Riolan’s University of Paris. The social ranking of physicians and surgeons was the opposite of the way most Americans use the words today. Physicians had a far superior social ranking than surgeons. Physicians not only practiced medicine, they taught it, they studied the great writers of the past, and they communicated in the purest Latin. By contrast, surgeons were manual laborers of the human body who spoke vulgar French. Physicians treated diseases; surgeons repaired injuries. Only physicians could order internal medicines to be prepared by apothecaries; surgeons were limited to preparing ointments and topical treatments. The boundaries were a constant source of struggle with new charters being issued several times a century. The barbers were at the bottom of the totem pole in this struggle. Their medical role was to provide first aid in the villages. Sometimes they were merged with the surgeons and sometimes they were separate. Habicot and Riolan were both active participants in this political-professional struggle between the guilds. At the time, Habicot was working to once again separate the barber-surgeons from a more professional group of pure surgeons. Riolan acted from time to time as the inquisitor-general for the Faculty of Medicine, accusing and prosecuting physicians who dared use unapproved treatments. Habicot was a prolific writer on medical issues who published a practical manual on medicine. In describing his own discoveries and innovations, he appeared to cross the line into teaching and this was something Riolan could not tolerate.

  The battle over Theutobochus continued off and on for five years. Four months after his original response, Riolan published a second anonymous attack, titled L’imposture descouverte des os humains supposés, et faussement attribués au Roy Theutobochus (The fraudulent discovery of alleged human bones falsely attributed to King Theutobochus). Even though the whole medical community knew he was the author, he still published anonymously, even going so far as to compliment the author of Gigantomachie. In this book, he expands on his anatomical critique of Habicot’s description and expands on his historical arguments. He does not go so far as to accuse Habicot of fraud but does call him naïve for being fooled by the real charlatan, Mazurier. A full quarter of his pamphlet is a direct attack on Habicot’s competence as a medical practitioner through a scornful rebuttal of an earlier treatise the surgeon had written on the muscles of the diaphragm. A significant difference between this pamphlet and Gigantomachie is that Riolan no longer claims the bones belonged to an elephant. Having had a while think about it, he doesn’t think these could have survived for seventeen centuries, as Tissot claims. Animal bones rot in the ground; only saints’ bones, being pure and incorruptible, last for centuries. The Theutobochus bones must be figured stones or “sports” or “jokes” of nature, natural mineral productions that only happen to look like bones. The word Riolan used to describe such a thing was fossile.

  The word fossil has undergone a lot of evolution since Roman times. The original Latin root, fodere, is a verb meaning “to dig.” From there the word evolved to become a noun, fossa, describing the excavation itself—a ditch, trench, or moat—and continued to be used in that sense by military engineers into modern times. By the Renaissance, the form fossile had appeared as an adjective or noun meaning “a thing dug up.” At first, it meant anything of interest or value found in the earth. Metal ore, gemstones, crystals, opals, and other stones containing images, and bones or stones that looked like bones were all dubbed fossils at this time along with human artifacts like pottery and hidden treasures. None of these were quite as passive as we think of them today. Figured stones could grow and move directed by various forces, such as the astrological influences of the stars. Many examples of such mineral growth could be observed. Crystals could be grown from a solution of salt. Sometimes stalactites and stalagmites could be measured and seen to become longer over a period of years. Mineral springs were known to encrust objects with calcium making them look like stones. Sand and small pebbles grew in some peoples’ kidneys. And every gardener, even today, knows that small rocks “grow” in vegetable patches over the winter. This generative power of the earth, sometimes called vis plastica, made it reasonable for people to think that not only could one bone-shaped stone form in isolation, but that several could form together giving the false appearance that they had once belonged to a living person or animal.

  If the tusks of the giant found on Marquis Langon’s land had survived, it would not have challenged Riolan’s conclusion in any way. Since antiquity, it was known that ivory could be found in the earth. Theophrastus, Plato’s student, wrote that a type of ivory “with white and dark markings” could be dug up. Theophrastus’s, work, On Stones, survived and influenced writers well into the Renaissance. In Riolan’s day, this substance was known as ebur fossile (fossil ivory). Pliny, and other Roman writers were happy to accept fossil ivory as the product of elephants. Elephants, being the wisest of animals, had many human characteristics, including burying their dead. No one believed that wild elephants had lived in France, but Hannibal and other armies had passed through. During the Middle Ages, this Classical tradition of thought about buried ivory began to be replaced by another set of beliefs. During the Renaissance, many, especially of the upper classes, believed fossil ivory to be the remains of unicorns, and one of the most precious of medicines. Riolan mentions the fact that buried ivory was often sold as unicorn.

  Unicorn lore began not as a legend, but as a rumor. Ctesias of Cnidus left the Greek world
in 416 BCE to become the personal physician to the Persian emperors Darius II and Artaxerxes II. He stayed abroad for seventeen years. When he returned to Greece, he wrote books based on what he had learned there. Though he never left the royal court, which stayed in the western part of the empire, he spent many evenings with merchants and travelers listening to their stories of lands to the far east. Ctesias did not have a great reputation among the literati of subsequent generations. At best, he was called gullible and at worst a liar. Only fragments of his books have survived leaving us little from which we can form our own judgment about his credibility. Not everything he wrote was dismissed out of hand. Some of his natural history was cautiously accepted and commented on by serious writers like Aristotle and Pliny. One of the animals he wrote about was the monoceros or unicorn. He described the unicorn as a type of wild ass native to India, as large as a horse and with a single horn growing from its forehead that was white near the animal’s face, black in the middle, and bright red at the tip. It was swift and powerful and almost impossible to catch. So far, there is nothing particularly fantastic about this animal except for the horn. The horn was special: “Those who drink out of these horns, made into drinking vessels, are not subject to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed, they are immune even to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else from these beakers.”