Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science

DISCOVERING THE

MAMMOTH

A TALE OF GIANTS, UNICORNS, IVORY, AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW SCIENCE

JOHN J. MCKAY

For Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Palaeontology may be said to have been founded on the Mammoth.

—Henry Neville Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters, 1896

Charles Darwin spent the last part of September 1833 traveling overland from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe in northern Argentina. As the naturalist on the HMS Beagle, it was his job to examine the local geology and collect samples of the plant and animal life whenever the ship landed. He also hunted for fossils. Four days into the trip, his caravan stopped on the banks of the Rio Tercero.

I staid here the greater part of the day, searching for fossil bones. . . . Hearing also of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff. They were, however, so completely decayed, that I could only bring away small fragments of one of the great molar-teeth; but these were sufficient to show that the remains belonged to a species of Mastodon.

Darwin mentions mammoth and mastodon bones several times in his memoir of the Beagle’s five-year voyage around the world. In these references, we can see him struggling with the problems that would lead him to formulate his theory of natural selection as the driver of evolution. He lists more than a dozen large mammals that had disappeared from the South American landscape, leaving it impoverished and transformed. With the exception of some horse teeth he found, he believed that the large mammals that produced the bones were extinct and that none of them still lurked in some hidden corner of the earth. From the depth and position in the earth where he found the bones, he determined that all of these missing species had lived together and that they had disappeared only recently. He had no doubt that they had all been native to regions where their bones were found. Though he had studied for the clergy, he never considered that their bones had been brought there by the biblical Deluge. He believed that the climate there had once been different (though not substantially so) and that such changes led one collection of lifeforms to be replaced by another. Finally, he believed that those changes worked slowly over many thousands, even millions, of years. Two generations earlier, when his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had formulated his own theory of evolution, all of these ideas had been controversial. A few generations before that, they were unthinkable ideas or, worse, sacrilegious.

In the 1690s, less than two centuries before Darwin roamed the coast of Argentina, literate Westerners became aware of a new type of ivory found in Eastern Russia. Muscovite merchants said the ivory came from an unknown Siberian beast that the natives called mamant. Their descriptions of this beast ranged from sea monsters to cave-dwelling shape-changers to the biblical Behemoth. The beasts were known only from their remains; no one had ever seen one alive. Westerners realized that the shape of the ivory was similar to that of elephants’ tusks, but knew it was impossible for elephants to live in the Arctic. As they struggled to make sense of this information from Siberia, other elephant-like bones were discovered in North America. Older giants’ bones and saints’ relics from places like Ireland and Germany were reexamined and also recognized to be elephant-like. It began to look as if elephants had once roamed all parts of the earth. How was this possible? Had the biblical Deluge, or a similar cataclysm, transported elephants’ bones all over the globe? Had the whole earth once been tropical and home to elephants? Or was the solution even stranger?

At the time these same people became curious about the mysterious mamant, or mammoth, the study of fossils was dominated by seashells found in the wrong places, whether it was deep underground or on mountain tops. Yet because the sea is large and its depths unknown, differences in shape from known species—even completely unknown species—were not difficult for people to explain away. The remains of unrecognizable land animals, especially large ones, were a tougher problem. The mysterious mammoth pushed fossil studies in a new direction. Unraveling that mystery required the development of a new, specialized intellectual toolkit. Unthinkable ideas such as extinction and a history of the earth itself separate from, and older than, human history needed to be embraced. Revolutions in geology, comparative anatomy, and taxonomy had to come about. Even folklore was enlisted to shed light on strange bones in the earth. Each advance, being applied to the mammoth problem, provided a template for studying other mysterious remains.

Is it excessive to say that without the mammoth there would have been no paleontology and no dinosaurs? Perhaps. But, without the mammoth as a focusing problem and a catalyst that drove a revolution in thinking, vertebrate paleontology would have taken longer—perhaps much longer—to develop. It’s difficult to say when attention would have shifted from seashells to bones. Mastodon bones from North America weren’t examined until the 1750s. The first completely unrecognizable vertebrate discovered in Europe was a moasaur found at Maastrict in the Netherlands in 1764 and it was another sea creature, not a land animal. Without knowledge of the Siberian mammoth with its strange name and extreme location, the bones of large land mammals found in Western Europe were easily explained by citing Hannibal’s elephants or the Roman circuses. It was the mammoth that forced European thinkers to reconsider giant bones in their own collections. The first frozen mammoth to be recovered was spotted near the Lena delta in 1799. By then, the intellectual toolkit of paleontology had more than a century to be assembled. Many of the basic concepts had been debated and rough consensuses had been achieved. The Western intellectual elite was ready to accept that the world was a very old place and that the mammoth was a lost species that had lived in a place where similar modern elephants could not survive. The past was stranger than they had imagined. It was a liberating moment. The first important paper on the subject listed three extinct species. Within a few years the number had risen to twenty and has continued to rise ever since.

The same year that the Lena mammoth was discovered, Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England. Her father, Richard Anning, was a cabinet maker who supplemented his income by beach-combing for fossils eroded out of the nearby cliffs. He sold these to visitors as novelties. Richard Anning died in 1810, leaving the family with no income other than the fossil collecting that Mary and her brother Joseph conducted. Mary and Joseph were very skilled at recognizing and cleaning fossils, at gathering fragments of fossils, and at reassembling them into more profitable wholes. If the fossils they collected had remained curios, the income from them would not have enough to keep the family together. Fortunately, the market had changed since the days when Richard Anning first collected them. The gentlemen who came down from London were no longer dilettante collectors looking for decorative pieces; many were involved in serious scientific pursuits. When Mary and her brother, barely in their teens, assembled the first complete ichthyosaur, no one questioned that such a strange creature had hunted in seas that once covered Dorset. The discovery was written up in the local paper. The fossil was purchased and eventually became the subject of six papers in the journal of the Royal Society (written, of course, by a man of a better class). The easy acceptance of Mary Anning’s strange fossils was the end result of a century of studying the mammoth. It was a marked contrast to a time when they would have been viewed as holy relics or jokes of nature, rocks that only coincidentally resembled bones.

Who discovered the mammoth? Don’t answer that; it’s a trick question. No one discovered the mammoth for the simple reason that mammoths were never unknown to us. From Cape Town to North Cape, from Spain to Siberia, from Ireland to Indonesia, and from Alaska to Argentina, we have lived among the bones and remains of mammoths and other extinct elephants for as long as we have been human. Long after the last mammoth died and was taken off the menu, our northern ancestors continued to use mammoth products. Their bones were used as building materials and their ivory was used to make tools and art, and as a trade commodity. But there came a time when our ancestors no longer knew what kind of creature the mammoth had been. Each culture interpreted the remains of mammoths and other giants through the lens of their own world view and mythology. When the Classical Greeks saw deposits of giant fossils, they knew they had discovered the battlefields where the gods had vanquished the Titans. When the Chinese discovered buried ivory, they knew they had found dragons’ teeth and used them for medicine. When Native Americans along the Ohio River found full skeletons in salt springs, they knew they were seeing the remains of the grandfathers of modern animals. When Northern Siberians found bloody carcasses eroding out of river banks, they knew they had found the recently deceased remains of giant mole-like creatures that caused the frozen ground to heave up in the winter and sink down in the spring. If no one discovered the mammoth, perhaps the question we should be asking is: how did the mammoth once again become a mammoth?

It began with someone finding some bones . . .

CHAPTER 1

GIANTS AND UNICORNS

Early on the morning of Friday, January 11, 1613, a group of workmen, digging in a sand pit near the Castle of Marquis Nicolas de Langon in the Dauphiné province of southern France, happened across the bones of a giant. We don’t know the names of the laborers, why they were digging, or what they thought of the bones, but we do know what they did next: they called off the work and sent someone to notify the master of the castle. Their response was more than a simple matter of taking advantage of an opportunity to get out of the weather, though that must have been a consideration; four months earlier, the powerful governor of the province, François de Bonne, the Marshal Lesdiguieres, had written to Langon specifically asking him to be on the lookout for large bones as he would like to have some for his cabinet of curiosities. These collections of natural history objects and curiosities had become popular in Renaissance Italy and no powerful or fashionable gentleman would dream of being without one. The discovery of large, ancient bones was not unknown in this part of France; the field where the laborers had been digging was known as the Field of Giants and Lesdiguieres made reference to other giant’s bones previously found on Langon’s lands. The marquis must have been pleased to be able to respond to the marshal so quickly. Before notifying Lesdiguieres, Langon sent for Pierre Mazurier (in some sources his name is given as Mazuyer), the barber-surgeon in the nearby town of Beaurepaire, to examine the bones and confirm the discovery. Mazurier arrived late that same day and confidently pronounced the bones to be those of a giant.

What happened next would be a source of controversy over the next months and years. As the workmen tried to lift the bones out of the pit, many of them fell to pieces leaving only unrecognizable fragments. Naturally, the workers were blamed for mishandling the bones. The accusation was a bum rap. It would have been difficult to save most of the bones. Ancient bones that have not petrified are very fragile things. Collagen rots and acidic water carries away many of the minerals. This is the beginning of petrification. Over a period of time, that can last from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years, these materials are replaced by dissolved silica from the surrounding earth and compressed to become rock. It is also one of the most vulnerable times for bones on that journey. As exposed bones dry out, deprived of the surrounding soil that had maintained their shape for so long, they become brittle and delicate. Only the densest parts of bones survive very long out of the ground without careful preparation. The old horror movie trope of a long-hidden skeleton turning to dust at the first touch has a basis in reality. When Mazurier arrived to look at the bones, they had already been sitting in the open air for ten hours. Frustratingly, the skull was among those that disintegrated. In many species, a skull might look solid but, in reality, it’s nothing more than a series of thin plates honeycombed by sinuses. This is especially true of elephants and their relatives. Later, when the identity of the bones was being debated, the convenient lack of a skull would be called out as proof of fraud. Of the bones Mazurier recovered, the best surviving pieces were two sections of jaw, with teeth, a complete tibia, two vertebrae, a rib, some ankle and foot bones, and the end parts of some of the long bones. All of the surviving bones were from the left side of the skeleton, which was deeper in the ground and partially petrified. Mixed in with the bones were some silver coins or medallions.

When he heard the news of the discovery, Lesdiguieres had Langon send some of the bones to the bishop of Grenoble, who gave them to the doctors at the university in his town to identify. The good doctors agreed with Mazurier and proclaimed them to be the bones of a giant. It’s safe to assume that these were the very best bones and that at least one of them ended up in Lesdiguieres collection. Lacking a skull, part of a nice femur or some teeth always make good additions to a cabinet of curiosities. Lesdiguieres collection has not survived so we can’t know for sure what he chose. At the same time, Langon sent some of the other bones to the university in Montpellier, home to a medical school. The doctors there, possessing state-of-the-art knowledge of anatomy, also pronounced them to be the bones of a giant. Confident now that he had a box of genuine giant’s bones, the question for Langon was what to do with them. Mazurier had an idea. He was sure people would pay to see the bones of a giant and convinced Langon to let him tour the country with them. Mazurier drew up a contract giving him exclusive rights to show the bones for eighteen months unless the king decided to purchase them. By late March, he was on the road to Paris.

Bones of giants would indeed be impressive, but many churches in France in the late seventeenth century already had a bone or two from a giant. What made Mazurier so confident that people would pay to see Langon’s bones was that these bones came with a good story. Mazurier commissioned a Jesuit from Lyon, named Jacques Tissot, to write a pamphlet. The title tells the whole story:

True history of the life, death, and bones of Giant Theutobochus, King of Teutons, Cimbri and Ambrones, defeated 105 years before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. With his army, which numbered four hundred thousand combatants, he was defeated by Marius, the Roman consul, killed and buried near the castle called Chaumont, and now Langon, near the town of Romans in Dauphiné. There his tomb was found, thirty feet in length, on which his name was written in Roman letters, and the bones therein exceeded 25 feet in length, with one of the teeth weighing eleven pounds, as you will see the in the city, all being monstrous in both height and size.

Who was this Theutobochus and how did he become identified with the bones? As the title of the pamphlet says, he was a barbarian king who threatened Rome at the end of the second century BCE. Not much is known about Theutobochus except that he was very large. The early Christian historian Paulus Orosius wrote that Theutobochus could vault over four or even six horses and that he towered above other men. Theutobochus was one of the leaders of a confederation of tribes that had been displaced from Denmark or northern Germany around 115 BCE. According to the Roman historian Florus, their lands were made uninhabitable by inundations of the sea. The Roman historian and geographer Strabo expressed doubt that such a thing was possible, but the phrase could easily describe a storm surge similar to that which flooded New Jersey and New York during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Coastline-changing storms of this sort hit the North Sea every few generations. The Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) of 1362 killed more than 25,000 people in the same region that the tribes under Theutobochus had called home and the second Grote Mandrenke in 1634 destroyed the Island of Strand. During the three centuries before the tribes began their trek, the North Sea had risen almost two meters, which would have made lowlands very vulnerable to inundation. After wandering through Central Europe for almost a decade, the tribes set their eyes on the fertile lands of the Po valley in northern Italy. The Roman Senate refused to allow them to enter Roman lands and sent an army to stop them from entering the valley. The northerners destroyed it. The Senate sent a second army and the northerners destroyed that one, too. They sent a third army and Celtic tribes in what’s now Switzerland destroyed it before it even reached the northerners. The fourth and fifth armies were sent together and, while the commanders squabbled over who was in charge, the northerners and the Celts joined forces to destroy them separately. At this point, rather than march on Rome, the tribes split up, with one part moving northwest to plunder Gaul (France) and the other southwest to plunder Iberia (Spain). During this lucky respite, Gaius Marius returned to Rome.

Marius was the ablest general of his generation. He had just concluded a victorious war in North Africa and been elected consul, the highest office in the Roman Republic. Through reforms enacted during an earlier term as consul, he was popular with the troops and the lower classes. This broad base made him by far the most powerful man in Rome. Whatever fears the senators may have had about concentrating too much power in the hands of one man, they feared the sack of the city and the destruction of their country even more. As preparations dragged on for the campaign against the German and Celtic invaders, they elected him to an unprecedented—and illegal—second, consecutive consulship. Marius gathered a force of veterans from Africa, bolstered by new conscripts, and entered Provence, an area that been annexed to the Roman Republic just fourteen years earlier. Two years passed, with Marius being elected to two more consulships, before the northerners returned to resume their march on Rome. Marius used those years training his new army and pacifying local Celtic tribes so that the northern barbarians would find no new allies and his armies would be hardened and confident after actual victorious combat.

In the summer of 102 BCE, Theutobochus led portions of the migrating tribes, made up of the Teutones, Ambones, part of the Cimbri, and one the revolting Swiss tribes, toward the route that Hannibal had used to cross the Alps 120 years earlier. This route led from the Rhône River, up the valley of the Isere, and over one of several possible passes to enter the Po valley from the northwest. Marius anticipated this route and had placed his army in a well-fortified camp at the junction of the Rhône and Isere Rivers, not far from where the Marquis Langon would have his lands seventeen centuries later. Theutobochus led his warriors in unsuccessful attacks against Marius’s defenses for three consecutive days. On the fourth day, rather than continue the attacks, Theutobochus broke off and led his people south hoping to take the coastal road along the Riviera to invade the Po valley from the Southwest. Marius waited until the entire horde was on the road, then broke camp and followed them. The Romans attacked and beat the barbarian rear guard and, full of confidence, raced past the main body of the horde to build a new fortified camp on high ground across the coastal road at the Roman settlement of Aquae Sextiae near the modern city of Marseilles. Once again Marius let Theutobochus attack his prepared position, this time uphill, under the unforgiving Mediterranean sun. Late in the day, the Romans counter-attacked, routing the northerners and killing tens of thousands. The fate of Theutobochus’s is unclear. Orosius says he was killed in the battle. Florus says he was taken alive to Rome for Marius’s triumphal parade, where, being a man of extraordinary stature, he towered above the trophies of his defeat. According to Roman tradition, he would have been executed in Rome immediately afterward.

How Theutobochus became identified with Marquis Langon’s giant’s bones is a bit of an historical mystery that has never been solved. Theutobochus’s story was fairly well known in France at the time. Both Orosius and Florus had been translated into common French several times since the advent of printing in the fifteenth century. Ten days after the discovery of the bones, Mazurier made a notarized statement about the discovery to Guillaume Assalin, the local constable. Mazurier gave the constable a very detailed description of the bones, including the skull which he had measured in place before the unsuccessful attempt to lift it out of the pit. Along with this description, Mazurier added two details. He claimed the workers found the bones inside a brick sepulcher thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high. On the front of it, he claimed, was a gray stone engraved with the words Theutobochus Rex. No trace of the tomb or the stone has ever turned up. He also described the silver medals saying they had the image of Marius on one side and the letters MA on the other.

In the four hundred years since, historians have generally regarded Mazurier as a charlatan who invented the Theutobochus story from whole cloth. If there was a fraud, Mazurier wasn’t alone in committing it. It’s highly unlikely that, of Marquis Langon, constable Assalin, and the notary, none of them was ever curious enough to look into the hole in the ground and confirm what Mazurier claimed. They would have known whether or not the tomb Mazurier described, or something like it, really existed. When critics began to attack Mazurier, all of these men were silent or unavailable for comment. Though none of them stepped forward to support him, none of them stepped forward to denounce him either. Although Theutobochus’s last battle took place at Aix near Marseilles, there was a local tradition in Dauphiné that battle took place on the stream that passes below the Castle Langon near where the earlier battles between Marius and Theutobochus had happened. The French paleontologist Léonard Ginsburg pointed out in the 1980s that the soil where the workers dug has a brick-like color and often breaks in straight lines. He believes that we should give Mazurier the benefit of the doubt and allow that his imagination caused him to see bricks and Roman letters where there were none and that his enthusiasm was great enough to convince the others to see the same.

We likely will never know the full truth of the discovery. What we do know is that the bones were real. For that, we should thank Mazurier rather than condemn him. The usual fate of giants’ bones in Medieval and Renaissance Europe was for them to be put on display at the local church or town hall as evidence of God’s majesty and to be brought out for special occasions until they fell to pieces. Alternatively, they might be picked up by a wealthy collector with an interest in the new natural philosophy, such as Marshal Lesdiguieres, and displayed in his cabinet of curiosities, also until they fell to pieces. Had either of these been the case, Langon’s bones would have vanished from history. Thanks to Mazurier’s showmanship, they did not. Mazurier brought the bones to the attention of a literate audience, who examined, argued over, and wrote about them. What the learned men of France had to say about the bones gives us an excellent view into how they viewed the whole concept of fossils at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.

On June 18, 1613, Mazurier arrived in Paris with the bones. He set up a tent with a large sign featuring a drawing of the bones and charged the curious a small fee to see the real thing. The show was a huge success. In two months, Tissot’s pamphlet ran through three more printings to meet popular demand. The show eventually attracted the attention of the court, as anticipated, and Mazurier received notice that the king would like to have the bones sent to Fontainebleau Palace so that he could look at them. King Louis XIII was twelve years old at the time. What twelve-year-old with unlimited power would not have asked to have them sent over? The bones were laid out in the chambers of the queen mother and regent, Marie di Medici. On seeing them, Louis asked a courtier if such giants had ever really existed. Yes, the courtier replied, imagine what a great army such men would make. The king was not enthusiastic about the idea; they would soon eat the country clean, he commented. By all appearances, the court enjoyed the exhibition. The king gave Mazurier a reward for the show, but even he had doubts about the Theutobochus part of the story. Two weeks after the viewing, the king’s secretary wrote to Langon requesting the rest of the bones and some parts of the tomb, including the gray stone inscribed with Theutobochus’s name, be sent to the court. Four days after that, Mazurier packed up, slipped out of town, and took the bones on a tour of northern France, England, and Flanders. He was last seen taking the bones to Germany. At least one other request for evidence of the tomb was sent from the court to Langon. Langon was away on business when both letters arrived. He stayed away for a year and never responded to the requests for additional evidence. Eventually, the king lost interest and the requests ceased.

Even though Mazurier and the bones had left Paris, people outside the court continued to talk about them for years and debate whether they were really the bones of a giant, and if it was a giant, whether that giant was Theutobochus, and whether they were really bones at all and not natural productions that just happened to look like bones. In late October, a pamphlet entitled Gygantosteologie, ou Discours des os d’un Géant (Gygantosteologie, or Speech on the Bones of a Giant) appeared in Paris. The author was Nicolas Habicot, a member of the barber-surgeon’s guild, the same guild as Mazurier. Habicot defended Mazurier’s claim that the bones were those of a human giant and specifically those of Theutobochus. Habicot’s pamphlet had three parts. First, he repeated Tissot’s story. Second, he explained how his own medical examination of the bones convinced him that these were the real remains of a human giant. Third, he made a more general argument for the historical existence of giants. Habicot was able to add many facts about the discovery that were not in Tissot’s pamphlet and that he could only have learned by talking to Mazurier, most importantly the measurements of the lost skull. Responding to the suggestion that bones might be those of some large animal such as a whale or elephant, Habicot explains that this is not possible. Man, he writes, possesses a soul as well as other unique attributes such as the bones in our hands that allow us make all manner of useful tools and the heels on our feet that allow us to walk upright. That last was very important to him. Two of the most identifiable bones Mazurier brought to Paris were a heel and and ankle bone. He admits he has never seen an elephant, but he knows it to be true that they do not possess these traits. Moving from the specific to the general, he delivers a passionate argument for the historical existence of giants. In this,