John J. McKay - 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. M C KAY

DISCOVERING THE MAMMOTH

Pegasus Books Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2017 by John J. McKay

First Pegasus Books cloth edition August 2017

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-68177-424-4

ISBN: 978-1-68177-481-7 (e-book)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

For Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

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

Henry Neville Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters , 1896

C harles 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 specieseven completely unknown specieswere 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 longerperhaps much longerto develop. Its difficult to say when attention would have shifted from seashells to bones. Mastodon bones from North America werent 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 Hannibals 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.