Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  Cuvier wasn’t finished with elephants when Adams brought his skin and bones back from Siberia. They continued to show up in his later major works. After Tilesius’s paper came out, he gave credit to the importance of his and Adams’s work. Although he was enthusiastic about naming extinct species, Cuvier had mixed luck with pachyderms. Blumenbach had several months’ precedent over him in naming the mammoth, meaning it would be called Elephas primigenius and not Elephas mammonteus. His clever name for the mastodon genus also lost out. In the nineteenth century, researchers noticed that Robert Kerr, a Scottish surgeon, had named it Mammut americanum in 1792 in an update of Linné’s system that he translated to English and expanded using Gmelin’s plant descriptions. Kerr doubly insulted Cuvier by later producing a bad translation of the first volume of Recherches, which gave the impression that Cuvier’s catastrophes were identical with the Deluge instead of local events of a nondivine nature.

  The number of species and genera of proliferated throughout the century. Many scientists, as they were now called, promoted Cuvier’s two genera to the rank of family and created new genera to fill the space between the families and the individual species. By midcentury, some writers were identifying more than forty species. In 1857, Hugh Falconer tried to make sense of it all by eliminating duplicates and reexamining the criteria for categories. He reduced things to one family with two genera and twenty-eight species. It was a good system and lasted for a short time, but the pace of new discoveries and the lure of naming rights left it in the dust. When Charles Osborn tackled the job of systematizing extinct elephants, they had been promoted one rank above family to become the order Proboscidea. Within that order, he identified five suborders, eight families, forty-four genera, and 362 species. Since then the trend has been to reduce the number species. There are currently about 175 recognized species of proboscideans, ranging from elephants and mammoths to mastodons, to four-tusked Gomphotheres, to Deinotheres with tusks on their chins that hooked downward, to the possum-sized ancestor of them all, Eritherium. Mammoths had a rough time in all this. They have been moved into their own genus, reunited with living elephants, moved out into a new genus, renamed, split into multiple species, and recombined. Today, there are about ten recognized species of mammoths sharing one genus. Most of these represent different stages of mammoth evolution, as they moved out of Africa and adapted to cooler climates.

  Understanding the world of the mammoth has been slower still. A great, but confusing, step was made in 1837 when Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist with a strong interest in freshwater fish, presented a paper arguing that a large part of the northern hemisphere had been covered by glaciers in the not so distant past. The idea was outrageous by the accepted norms at the time, but the evidence, such as glacial moraines hundreds of miles away from the nearest mountains, was so overwhelming and it was accepted in a relatively short time. This was another piece in understanding the world of the mammoth, though at the time they were unsure whether mammoths had died out during the ice age as they unsuccessfully tried to adapt to the coldest stage or if they had died out afterward because they failed to adapt to the warmer world.

  In 1864, Édouard Lartet made a discovery that would make it possible to give a relative date to mammoths. Lartet was a wealthy lawyer who spent his summers engaging in his passion for paleontology. Every year he brought back a nice collection of fossils and made several significant discoveries. That summer, he and his English partner, Henry Christy, were working at the la Madeleine rock shelter where archaic humans had once lived. In May, Lartet was showing Hugh Falconer around the site when the workmen came across some artifacts. One was a piece of ivory with scratches on the outer surface. Falconer recognized the image of a running mammoth. Here, at last, was proof that humans and mammoths had lived together. Mammoths were not from some distant age before man. In other caves, painted images and carvings of mammoths were discovered. Of the many hundreds of painted images that have been found in European caves, mammoths are the third most common animal represented.

  In 1822, Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville coined the word paléontologie to describe the study of fossils and the methods of Cuvier. Besides being a practicing anatomist and paleontologist, he was one of the first to write about the history of paleontology. Thirteen years after coining the word, he wrote a long paper about the Theutobochus controversy more than two hundred years earlier. Blainville located the various pamphlets that had been published at the time as well as other relevant documents and letters. His account is quite hostile to Habicot; Blainville felt his defense of giants marked him as an obstinate and superstitious old man. The occasion of his writing the article was that he believed he had located the bones in a theater in Bordeaux. He was wrong. The last decendent of Marquis Langon wrote a few months later to say that the bones were still in the family and sent some of them to the museum in Paris.

  A strong case can be made for the role of proboscideans in making us who we are. Modern elephants reuse the same routes in their travels for generation after generation. In some countries, like Thailand, human engineers have found the elephant roads so well sited that they simply paved them over to make human roads. When our hominid ancestors left Africa, they might have literally followed the elephants. When we reached new lands, how did we know what to eat? The paleontologist Elizabeth Vrba has suggested that our ancestors watched what the local proboscideans ate. In areas like northern Asia and the Americas, which we colonized in an amazingly short time, observing what a familiar animal ate and eating the same would have been a very handy way of measuring the safety of strange plants. If our ancestors would have dug the same roots and picked the same fruits that the local proboscideans did, they would have avoided some potentially dangerous trial-and-error experimentation and discovered avocados.

  We journeyed with mammoths and their kin for millennia. They helped us find our way and food to eat, and they also became food. They provided us with the materials to build shelters, make tools, and practice art. Even upon their extinction, they helped us discover the antiquity of the world. Mammoths were a focusing problem for a scientific revolution. Beginning as giants, unicorns, or proof of the Flood, they became a symbol of how strange and mysterious the past had been. Were these animals elephants? If so, what were so many of them doing in the far north and how did they live there? If not, then just what were they and what happened to them? The answers required new tools and new ways of looking at nature and the past. Today, they help us understand genetics and ancient environments. Our enduring fascination with mammoths and the availability of frozen cadavers makes them the best-understood extinct animal. While we have mapped the genome of several extinct species, that of the mammoth has been more closely studied than any other. We now know that they came in several colors, including blond and ginger as well as the familiar chestnut used by most artists. We’ve discovered a mutation in their blood hemoglobin that improved oxygen delivery in low temperatures. Probing the guts of frozen mammoths, we have reconstructed the flora that fed an entire food chain. Mammoths were the keystone species in the Siberian and Alaskan environments that humans passed through as they entered the Americas—and had possibly been there for thousands of years before that. When the first Americans passed the ice that covered Canada, we know that they found more mammoths on the other side. Beyond them, they found other proboscideans almost to the end of South America.

  We followed mammoths. We learned from them. We learned about them and created a new science. We miss them so much that we want to resurrect them from extinction more than any other animal. They are an inextricable part of the history of the peoples of the north and of the New World. They still have much to teach us.

  Our journey together continues.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  FIGURE 1: The giant’s tooth found near Krems, drawn from life by Matthew Merian (1651).

  FIGURE 2: The relative sizes of famous giants according to Athanasius Kircher (1678). From left to right: The gia
nt mentioned by Boccaccio, Goliath, the Leyden giant, and four classical giants described by Pliny.

  FIGURE 3: The Quedlinburg unicorn. The earliest account is a secondhand retelling by Otto von Guericke in 1672. The earliest surviving illustration didn’t appear until 1704.

  FIGURE 4: The white elephant (Ylefanz blanc) of Rucheni, located in northwestern Russia on a 1550 map by Pierre Descleliers.

  FIGURE 5: Walrus or mammoth? The morsus located near Norway on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carte Marina.

  FIGURE 6: Nicolaas Witsen’s map of northeast Asia represented the most up-to-date knowledge of Siberia in 1690.

  FIGURE 7: A complete mammoth’s jaw sent to Witsen in 1707 by his Russian friends.

  FIGURE 8: Baron Kagg’s Behemoth (1723). One Swedish POW’s idea of the mammoth based on native tales, some bones, and lots of imagination.

  FIGURE 9: A mammoth skull based on sketches by Messerschmidt. It is the first truly accurate drawing of a mammoth skull to be printed (1738).

  FIGURE 10: The skull of an extinct elephant found near Tonna in 1695. The tusks look short because the artist is looking directly at the elephant’s face. The written description describes the tusks as almost twice as long as the skull.

  FIGURE 11: From top to bottom: the femurs of an Asian elephant, a mastodon, and a mammoth. Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton decided that they all came from the same species, calling the differences in girth nothing more than differences in age and sex (1762).

  FIGURE 12: A mastodon’s tooth gifted to Jean Etienne Guettard (1752). For a decade, this would be the best image that European savants had to work with.

  FIGURE 13: Despite many reports of bloody mammoths eroding out of riverbanks in Siberia, the first frozen giant to be recovered with soft parts such as skin was a woolly rhinoceros found on the Vilui River near the Arctic circle (1772).

  FIGURE 14: Roman Boltunov’s attempt to reconstruct a well scavenged mammoth that he saw in a snowstorm (1805). This copy and a piece of the mammoth’s skin were sent to Johann Blumenbach.

  FIGURE 15: Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius’ masterful reconstruction of the first complete mammoth to be recovered (1815).

  FIGURE 16: The Adams mammoth on display in the Kunstkammera. Tilesius didn’t get everything right.

  FIGURE 17: The 1864 discovery at la Madeleine rock shelter of a piece of tusk engraved with the image of a mammoth proved humans and mammoths had lived together.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For me, the problem with writing acknowledgments to a first book is that I don’t know if there will be a second one. To be on the safe side, I feel like I should thank everyone who has ever inspired me, informed me, supported me, encouraged me, nudged me in the right direction, spoken a kind word, bought me a drink, or been my cat. And, having filled half of this volume with such a list, I would spend the rest of my life terrified that I had slighted someone deserving. So, here’s the abbreviated list of people who most affected this book. Without question, first position goes to the women in my life: to my sisters, Ellen McKay and Carol Bohm, who have always been there to catch their little brother when he falls; and to my ex-wife, Tessa Murphy, who patiently listened to years of exposition about mammoths, the scientific revolution, and weird ideas involving mammoths. Next, I’d like to thank the diverse community of science bloggers, commenters, social media friends, and scholars who, over the last nine years, have encouraged me and helped me clarify my ideas and direction. I would also like to thank librarians around the world and the internet itself.

  There literally is no way I could have written this book without the internet. This book grew out of a single blog post. I have a great love of conspiracy theories and fringe ideas. Many years ago, I noticed that lost history theories—Atlantis, polar shift, flood geology, and rogue planets—all used frozen mammoths as proof positive of their ideas. I planned a single post establishing a chronology of what was known about mammoths and when. At some point, while looking up the context of a quote, I realized I was going to look all of them up, regardless of the language. I wanted to know where it started. But, the books and documents I needed were in rare book collections all over Europe. That’s when the internet saved me.

  World War II demonstrated the myopic view of Westerners toward the vulnerability of historical knowledge. Hitler held a special grudge against Serbia for Germany’s defeat in World War I. In the blitz against Yugoslavia, the national museum in Belgrade was specifically targeted to erase the Serbian nation. Less than three years later, Allied bombers burned down most of Central Europe. Vast numbers of historical documents were lost. After the war, libraries in Europe began copying rare books and sending microfiches and microfilms to other libraries around the world. Later, this evolved into scanning them, giving access to anyone, anywhere who had access to an internet connection. The collections I have used most are the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Internet Archive, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Hathi Trust, the Rhino Research Center, Google Books, and the Guttenberg Project. There are many others.

  Last, and most importantly of all, I want to dedicate this book to my parents, Leonard and Mary Jane McKay. They taught me to love words and to see the history in all things.

  NOTES

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  INTRODUCTION

  p. ix“I staid here”—Darwin, pp. 146–147.

  CHAPTER 1

  p. 1Discovery—Desfontaines, pp. 224–228.

  p. 1Cabinets of curiosities—Findlen, pp. 1–11.

  p. 1Letter of Lesdiguieres—Ginsburg, p. 196.

  p. 2Inventory—Three different inventories have been published. The earliest is in Desfontaines, pp. 224–228.

  p. 2Fragility of skulls—Ginsburg, p. 37.

  p. 2Confirmation by universities—Habicot, pp. 71–72.

  p. 3Contract—Desfontaines, p. 221.

  p. 4Tissot’s pamphlet—Translation in Cumston. Note: Cumston’s commentary is plagiarized from Fournier. Blainville (Mémoire) says that Tissot was not a Jesuit, but gives no reason for this claim.

  p. 4Theutobochus—There are many spellings of his name in historical literature. He would have pronounced it something like Teutobod.

  p. 4Theutobochus against Rome—This story in told in most histories of the Roman Republic. I used Mommsen, vol. 3, pp. 178–191.

  p. 4Grote Mandrenke and coastal change along the North Sea—Behre.

  p. 7Imagination run wild—Ginsburg, pp. 205–206.

  p. 8Giant soldiers—Fournier, p. 244.

  p. 8Request for more bones and bricks—Desfontaines, pp. 219–220.

  p. 8Touring the North—Richer and Renaudot.

  p. 8Habicot—Cohen, pp. 31–33.

  p. 10Lucretius—Céard, p. 37.

  p. 11Augustine—Cohen, pp. 23–26.

  p. 11Classical accounts of discoveries—Mayor, The First, appendix 2.

  p. 12Boccaccio—Kircher, pp. 57–58.

  p. 12Abel on cyclops—Abel, Die Tiere, pp. 31–33.

  p. 13Species of dwarf elephants—Poulakakis et al.

  p. 13Lucern giant—Plateri, pp. 548–549.

  p. 15Kircher giant comparison—Kircher, pp. 59–60.

  p. 15Zwinger—Céard, p. 58.

  p. 15Maggi—Ibid., pp. 61–63.

  p. 15Gorp—Ibid., pp. 64–66.

  p. 17Riolan’s response—Ginsburg, pp. 188–189.

  p. 17Number of bones—This is a more complicated question than most nonbiologists might think. Americans are taught that the human body has 206 bones. Sure, some people might be born with an extra finger or lacking a rib, but 206 is normal, average. This is not what Riolan and Habicot debated. They were arguing over the very definition of “bone.” Several parts of the human skeleton that we call single bones in adults begin as multiple, flexible bone pieces that gradually fuse together as we stop growing. Riolan was particularly arg
umentative about how many bones the sternum (breastbone) qualified as. Riolan, Gigantomachie, pp. 10–14.

  p. 19Politics of French medicine—Pasquier, chaps. 31 and 32.

  p. 19Meaning the word fossil—Rudwick, The Meaning, pp. 1–3.