History of Mammoth Discoveries
By William Lee
In May 2007, a nomadic reindeer herder in Russia’s remote Arctic Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region discovered what he at first thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. It was a find of momentous paleontological value: the nearly complete carcass of a one-month-old woolly mammoth calf, frozen since its death from asphyxiation 40,000 years ago during end of the last ice age. The three-foot-tall, 110-pound creature—which scientists playfully named Lyuba, after the reindeer herder’s wife—no longer had the shaggy coat that characterized Mammuthus primigenius, one of several species of mammoths that roamed the earth between roughly 3 to 4 million and 10,000 years ago. But otherwise, the creature was preserved in nearly perfect condition.
Lyuba promises to become a treasure trove of information about mammoths and the long-vanished world in which they lived and died. But it is only the latest chapter in a long history of mammoth discoveries, dating back more than 2,000 years, which long have inspired curiosity and wonder. Contemporary scientists are only the latest successors to the ancient Chinese, medieval European physicians and theologians, the early 18th century Russian czar Peter the Great, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and scores of others who over the centuries have pondered mammoth remains. Some saw them as relics of an extinct race of antediluvian giants, while others speculated that they might be specimens of fantastic creatures still roaming in unexplored regions. Too many, sadly, saw them not as a precious remnant of the Earth’s past, but as a source of valuable ivory to be exploited and then tossed away to rot. But eventually, mythmaking and greed yielded to science, and brought us to our state of knowledge about the elephantine beasts that our own ancient ancestors once hunted for food.
The first written reference to mammoths is in the Shên I King, a book by Tang-fang So, a minister of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, who ruled China from 140 to 87 BCE. He wrote of the k'i shu, a gigantic, rodent-like creature that lived beneath the ice of the frozen north: “Its flesh weighs a thousand pounds and may be used as dried meat for food… its hair is about eight feet in length, and is made into rugs, which are used as bedding and to keep out the cold. The hide of the animal yields a covering for drums, the sound of which is audible over a distance of a thousand miles.” Eating mammoth flesh, he noted, was believed to be a remedy for fevers.
Frozen mammoth carcasses didn’t remain intact in the warmer climates of Europe and Africa, but their bones were still to be found, and people tried to come up with explanations for them. The early Catholic theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, who lived from A.D. 354 to 430, cited the discovery of an immense tooth—which some suspect actually belonged to a mammoth—as proof of the existence of the giants mentioned in the Old Testament. The “giants” theory persisted through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. When what probably was a mammoth skeleton was unearthed in France in 1613, a physician named Pierre Mazurier examined the bones and proclaimed that they were the remains of Teutobochus, a legendary 30-foot-tall German king of antiquity. Others argued that enormous bones found in Europe belonged to mythical creatures such as unicorns.
Nicolaas Witsen, a Dutch politician, writer, and shipbuilder who journeyed to Russia to lend his expertise to the czar Peter the Great’s navy, may have been the first westerner to actually examine the thawed flesh of a mammoth. In his 1695 travelogue Noord en Oost Tartarye, he wrote of seeing the dark brown, smelly remains of an immense Siberian creature called the “mammout,” which, if spotted in the wild, “betokens much calamity.” Witsen speculated that the creature was a mystical relative of the Behemoth, a beast with twisting horns in the biblical Book of Job.
But the czar himself subscribed to another theory that was gaining in popularity among European intellectuals: the remains belonged to elephants, perhaps from the armies of Alexander the Great, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, or some other ancient commander. In 1728, the British anatomist Hans Sloane examined fossil teeth and tusks from Siberia and concurred that they came from elephants. Sloane also came up with an alternate theory to explain how the remains of creatures normally found in the tropics had ended up so far to the north. He wrote that Siberian settlers believed that the region had a warmer climate in the days before the great flood described in the biblical Book of Genesis, and that the deluge washed the mammoths’ bodies into subterranean cavities.
