Leibniz wrote the geology in 1691-3 and it was not published during his lifetime. Shortly before his death in 1716, the Elector asked him to prepare that work for publication and assigned an engraver, Nikolaus Seeländer, to prepare some illustrations. Seeländer’s version was made public in 1749 when the then librarian of the house of Brunswick edited the treatise into chapters and published it in Latin and German as Protogaea, or A Dissertation on the Original Aspect of the Earth and the Vestiges of Its Very Ancient History in the Monuments of Nature. Seeländer’s illustration is more detailed and carefully executed than Valentini’s, which has a slightly cartoonish feel about it. Seeländer uses dotted lines to indicate missing vertebrae. The sources for most of Seeländer’s illustrations are known. In all cases, they are very faithful reproductions of the originals. He was not one to incorporate flights of fancy, so we can be confident that his version is the more accurate copy of Mäyern’s.
What was it that the Zeunickenberg miners brought out and showed to Mäyern and the Princess Abbess? After the publication of Protogaea, several more visitors took a shot at figuring out what it was. More than one thought the illustration and bone fragments resembled those of a rhinoceros, though they were at a loss to explain what a rhinoceros would be doing in Germany. In 1866, when Oscar Fraas included the drawing and story in his Vor der Südfluth! (Before the Deluge), a history of the prehistoric world. Fraas commented that the drawing appeared to be a composite of bones from more than one animal, probably a horse with a mammoth tusk attached to the forehead. Of course, Othenio Abel took an interest in the Quedlinburg unicorn. He had already casually mentioned the story in several of his books, crediting Fraas as his source, before he decided to get serious and figure out what the skeleton really had been in 1925. The actual bones had long since disappeared and no other drawings or descriptions had ever been made of them. The best evidence Abel had to work with was Seeländer’s plate. Like Fraas, he immediately recognized that it was not a single skeleton; the bones came from at least two individuals and two different species. The skull is that of a woolly rhinoceros. The teeth, scapulae, and vertebrae are from a mammoth. Most of the spine has been reassembled backwards and upside down. What at first glance look like ribs are actually the dorsal spines that are part of the individual vertebrae. These spines are what form the characteristic hump over a mammoth’s shoulders. The loop at the bottom of the spine is the first cervical vertebra turned sideways. And the horn; what is the horn? It’s too long to be a walrus tusk and too wide to be a narwhal tooth, Leibniz’s preferred explanation for fossil ivory. Rhinoceros horns are not made of bone or ivory. They’re made of keratin, the same material as hair and finger nails. It’s unlikely that the learned burgers of Quedlinburg would have mistaken that for a unicorn horn. That left mammoth tusk, which easily meets the length and width requirements of the description. It takes a little more speculation to explain its being straight and not curved. There are two possibilities here. One is that the tusk was badly enough broken up that the people who reassembled it had the freedom to make it any shape they wanted. The other possibility is that it came from a different kind of extinct elephant, such as the straight tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, a species that went extinct about 25,000 years before the mammoth, but whose bones are as common in that part of Germany as mammoths’ are.
Though the attempts to explain the Krems and Quedlinburg discoveries leave much to be desired from our perspective, they were an improvement from the time of Habicot and Riolan. While Habicot stubbornly hung on to his preferred explanation that the bones came from a giant, Riolan tried out three explanations without ever settling on one. The first was that the bones came from a giant; he rejected this one out of hand. The second was that the bones came from some rare, but known, animal; he mentioned elephants and whales because they were the biggest animals they knew of, not because he had any knowledge of their skeletons. The third possible explanation was once more that they weren’t bones at all; they were jokes of nature, mineral constructions that mimicked the appearance of bones. By mid-century, it was the third explanation far less frequently invoked. It hadn’t completely been abandoned, but it had become the last choice for explaining mysterious bone. No one questioned the organic origin of the Krems and Quedlinburg discoveries. Giants, dragons, and unicorns, while fanciful, were all living things. What was missing was the knowledge necessary to figure out exactly what kind of animal produced a given set of giant bones.
By the last quarter of the century, traveling elephant shows had become common enough that they penetrated the remoter parts of Europe. In June 1681, a showman named Wilkins brought a young Asian elephant to Dublin, Ireland and set up a booth near the custom house to show it. Early on the morning of Friday the seventeenth, the booth caught fire and the poor creature was killed before he could bring it to safety. Wilkins realized there was still money to be made if could salvage the skeleton to show. He was able to have a troop of musketeers sent over to guard the corpse from souvenir seekers while he set out to hire as many butchers as he could to clean the bones before the rotting flesh became a public nuisance. Late in the day, a doctor named Alan Mullen heard about the elephant and rushed over to negotiate with Wilkins. Mullen wanted to have an orderly dissection with artists ready to make renderings of each part. Wilkins was willing to let Mullen direct the work of the butchers, but insisted that they finish the work in one day and dispose of the smelly parts before Sunday when they would not be allowed to work. Mullen ordered the butchers to start working immediately. They worked through the night and into the next day. Mullen wrote up descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s parts and sent them to Will Petty of the Royal Philosophical Society in London. In his report, he expresses disappointment that he hadn’t been able to do a more thorough job. He needn’t have been so humble. His examination was far superior to anything that been published in Europe (in India, veterinary treatises on elephants had been available for centuries). Petty had Mullen’s letter published as a pamphlet along with a second letter from Mullen on the structure of the eye. In the forty-two pages dedicated to the elephant, he describes all of the major organs and some of the muscle groups, but gives surprisingly little space to the bones. This lack is made for by a trifold diagram of the reconstructed skeleton which Wilkins had managed to assemble and put on display. A second illustration was dedicated to just the skull. Habicot and Riolan had both had to admit that they had never seen an elephant and regretted the lack of materials that would allow them to make a proper comparative study of the bones. Thanks to Wilkins, Mullen, Petty, and the poor nameless elephant, the savants of Europe finally had something to use for comparison when examining giants’ bones.
CHAPTER 2
THE IVORY TRAIL
If the giants and unicorns of France and Germany had been the only mammoths that Western European thinkers in the late seventeenth century had had to work with, it would have been decades, possibly even a whole century, before they recognized them as a species separate from modern elephants. As it was, most of the eighteenth century would pass before they realized African and Asian elephants were more than one species. Once the bones were properly identified as elephantine in nature, there would have been no mystery about them that needed to be solved. Normal elephants north of the Alps could easily be explained by Hannibal, the Romans, or by the stories of medieval kings receiving elephants as gifts from eastern emperors, such as Charlemagne’s elephant. It was the arrival of Siberian ivory called “mammoth” that created a distinct problem. This ivory looked like elephant ivory, but everyone knew elephants could not have lived in the frigid climes of Northern Asia and there was no known history that had someone bringing large numbers of them there. There were no Roman armies or powerful monarchs in the far reaches of the taiga and no good reason for them to go there. For the idea of the mammoth as an entirely separate being to get to Europe and require explanation, we need to look at the trade that brought the ivory there.
At
least eight hundred years before the word “mammoth” arrived in Western Europe, ivory from the lands that would become northern Russia was being traded on the international market. Sometime before the year 890, a Viking named Ohthere showed up at the court of King Alfred of Wessex. Later generations would call the king of Wessex Alfred the Great, the unifier of England and the man who let a peasant woman beat him for burning her bread. That last part is one of those apocryphal stories of a kind king traveling incognito to learn about the hard lives of the common folk. Even though the bread story never happened, Alfred was a pretty impressive guy. Along with unifying the petty English kingdoms, he beat back Viking colonizers, made London the capital and the most important city in England, and took time off to translate important works of literature into the common language. While at the court, such as it was, Ohthere presented Alfred with a large piece of ivory and described his travels in distant lands (a story that did not involve plundering England). Alfred was pleased enough that he wrote down Ohthere’s story and attached it to his translation of the world history written by the early Christian writer Paulus Orosius, the same historian who described the war with Theutobochus. There is no record of what he did with the ivory.
The story Ohthere told Alfred began with an account of his wealth and his lands before moving on to his travels. Ohthere was a lord in Hålogaland, the northernmost settlement of the Norwegians, as he described it. He told the king that he had “wished to discover on some occasion how long the land lay due north, and whether any man lived due north of the wilderness.” Ohthere described sailing north for three days, east for three days, and finally south for five days. There he stopped at the mouth of a great river. This voyage would have taken him around North Cape and the Kola Peninsula and into the White Sea. At this point in his story he admits, “Chiefly he went thither, to increase the examination of the land, because of the horse whales [walruses], because they have a very noble bone on their teeth . . . and their hide is very good for ship-rope.” What made Ohthere’s hunting trip interesting to Alfred was that there was no record of anyone having sailed into those waters before. The very fact that the land turned east and didn’t continue north to the pole was news to the English. Ohthere’s tale is also the first recorded mention of the walrus.
But Ohthere didn’t just give Alfred some nice walrus ivory; he gave him ivory from a completely unknown animal. No wonder the king was impressed. It’s important to note that Ohthere didn’t sail north on a whim; he had a specific economic goal in mind. He was familiar with walrus ivory and knew where to look for it. Before his voyage, Ohthere’s access to ivory would have been through overland trade with Sami (Lapp) middlemen. As the lord of Hålogaland, the local Sami reindeer herders paid him an annual tribute. While in the White Sea, Ohthere spent considerable time interviewing leaders of the people he called Bjarmians and learning about conditions in the region. By proving a sea voyage to the White Sea was possible, he eliminated the middlemen. Others followed.
The extent of Norse trade in the White Sea is hard to estimate. Most of the Norse records of that era are sagas, whose authors were more interested in recording adventures, feats of arms, and impressive plundering than in documenting mundane business transactions. But, buried in those sagas are plenty of indirect hints that regular, peaceful trade was happening. Many of the plundering expeditions focused on the same spot, the mouth of the Dvina River, which was the northwestern end of several river trading networks and the place where Ivan the Terrible would later order the town of Archangel to be built. The sagas of St. Olaf make clear the importance if this spot. Sometime in the early eleventh century, Olaf and Karli of Hålogaland entered into a partnership for a trading trip to the Dvina mouth. Along the way, they were joined by Thorir the Hound. After conducting some profitable business, they began to leave but, on the way home, Thorir convinced the others to return and plunder the region. The main point of the story was to set the background for later conflicts between Olaf and Thorir leading up to Olaf becoming a saint. However, in passing the saga lets us know there was a regular seasonal market at the Dvina mouth governed by an established truce. Even though they returned and proceeded to plunder the Bjarmians, Olaf, Karli, and Thorir waited for the truce to expire before doing so. There were rules for trade in the area that even the bloodiest Vikings respected.
The Norse trade in the White Sea declined around 1250. In that century, the northern hemisphere was beginning to cool. Expanding sea ice near North Cape made the voyage increasingly difficult. At the same time, the Norse faced strong competition from merchants on the Volga who paid good prices for walrus ivory to sell in Persia and the Middle East. Even if the prices weren’t that great, dealing with mostly honest river traders must have been preferable for the Bjarmians to selling to people like Thorir who were going to come back later, kill everyone, and take their money back. Leaving the White Sea did not put the Norse out of the ivory business. During the same years that they developed a market in Western Europe for walrus ivory, Norse sailors ventured out into the Atlantic and colonized Iceland and Greenland. When these colonies were brought under the control of the Danish-Norwegian crown, the preferred way for these distant communities to pay their taxes was to send walrus ivory. The art historian Paul Williamson has estimated that most of the ivory carved in Europe from 1000 to 1300 was walrus ivory.
In the century following Ohthere’s voyages, Muslim writers began to speak of walrus ivory as a product of the north. Though there are some fascinating, but cryptic, references before the tenth century, the first unmistakable mention of Arctic ivory in the Middle East comes from the geographer Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Muqaddasi. In 985 he wrote that the products of the north were “sables, miniver, ermines, and the fur of steppe foxes, martens, foxes, beavers, spotted hares, and goats; also wax, arrows, birch bark, high fur caps, fish glue, fish-teeth, castoreum, amber, prepared horse hides, honey, hazel nuts, falcons, swords, armor, khalanj wood, Slavonic slaves, sheep and cattle. All these came from Bulgar. . . .” Bulgar or Great Bulgaria, on the middle Volga River, was a major market trading manufactured goods from the Islamic world for forest products from the north. The term “fish-teeth” in the middle of al-Muqaddasi’s list is the primary name by which walrus ivory was known when traded into southern and eastern Asia. Fifty or so years after al-Muqaddasi, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni wrote that “the Bulgar bring from the northern sea teeth of a fish over a cubit long. White knife hafts are sawed out of them for the cutlers.” He goes on describe how no part of the ivory was wasted. Al-Biruni and several other writers following him commented on the fantastic prices paid for fish-teeth in Arabia and Egypt, despite the fact that both of these places had access to Indian and African elephant ivory. In time, fish-tooth knife and sword handles became so popular in South Asia that they were even imported into India for exorbitant prices.
For our purposes, the most interesting comment by a Middle Eastern writer comes from Abu Hamid al-Gharnati in the mid-twelfth century. Al-Gharnati was born in Andalusia, Spain and traveled the length and breadth of the Muslim world. He lived for several years in Bulgar. In writing about his years there he describes the walrus ivory trade, and adds that “teeth were also found in the ground like elephant’s tusks, white like snow, one weighing two hundred menn [250 pounds]; it was not known from what animal it was derived; it was wrought like ivory, but was stronger than the latter and unbreakable.” He goes on to say that these teeth could be sold in Khorezm (in modern Uzbekistan) for a great price. “Elephant tusks” dug out of the ground in northern Asia can only mean mammoth ivory. But, we should be careful about reading too much into this statement. Mammoth ivory often erodes out of the banks of the Volga and Don in the vicinity of Bulgar. That the tusks were being sold in Bulgar is not necessarily evidence that Siberian mammoth ivory had entered trade networks going south and west at that time. It is, however, evidence that, when it showed up, ivory merchants viewed it as just as desirable as other forms of ivory.
Along with west an
d southwest, the third direction a regular trade in Siberian mammoth ivory could have developed was to the southeast—China. Since the early nineteenth century, naturalists and historians have been fascinated by the idea that mammoth ivory was known in ancient China. Formal trade between Russia and China began in the 1690s when literate Westerners arrived in Siberia in meaningful numbers. Twenty years later, they discovered that the local fur traders had already developed a regular trade in mammoth ivory with China. The Chinese have known and loved ivory since the earliest times. There is no record on either the Russian or Chinese side that the Chinese showed the slightest resistance to accepting mammoth ivory as real ivory. Does this mean they were already familiar with it? It might. By a lucky coincidence, at the same time Russian Cossacks started hunting for mammoth ivory to sell to China, the Kangxi emperor, who reigned from 1661 to 1722, was writing a natural history of his own empire. When Western naturalists became curious about Chinese knowledge of the mammoth in the early nineteenth century, they discovered that all the relevant documents had already been collected for them by the late emperor.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 6
