When Karl Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) created his scheme for
cataloging and naming everything in the natural world, he had to deal with some
forms that defied easy categorization. One of these was the mammoth. The
mammoth had been a hot topic of discussion for the Swedish Academy during the
1720s. When Linné attended Uppsala University, he lived for a time, with Olof
Rudbeck the Younger who had been very active in the mammoth discussions.
Rudbeck believed mammoth bones found in the Arctic were the remains of the elephants
that had transported the lost tribes of Israel into the North where they founded
the Swedish and Lapp nations. Linné did not adopt that theory. In the first
edition of his
Systema Naturae (1835), the mammoth as "Mammatowacost"
appears in small Gothic script as the last entry in the mineral kingdom.
Linné's categorization reflected gradually evolving ideas
about both fossils and mammoths. In both cases the questions involved were as
much lexicological as they were scientific. The word "fossil" underwent
a great transformation between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Around
1500, "fossil" meant anything unexpected found in the earth. As well
as the petrified remains of former life forms, the word encompassed crystals,
interestingly shaped rocks, old bones, amber, and human artifacts. A Roman coin
was just as much a fossil as was a trilobite. A relic of this usage is the
phrase "fossil fuel." For most of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, the scientific side of the question was whether stones that
resembled shells and bones were truly petrified remains or whether they were
just interestingly shaped rocks, jokes of nature. By Linné's time, the
scientific question had been largely settled, but the linguistic one was still
fuzzy. Linné divided his mineral kingdom into three parts: rocks, minerals and
fossils. He further divided fossils into three parts: soil, concretions, and petrifications.
It was in the last, under "Petrified Quadrupeds", that he placed
Mammatowacost.
The problem with the word "mammoth" can be seen in
a work written by a fellow Swede twenty years before Linné. While a POW in
Siberia, Johann Bernard Müller was commissioned to write an ethnography of the
Ostiak people. Müller was able to complete his work in record time, in part,
because he ran into Gregory Novitsky, a religious exile who had already done a
large part of his research for him, including collecting local legends about
the mammoth.
There is a Curiosity in Siberia, no where else to met with
in any Part of the World, for ought I know. This is what the Inhabitants call
Mamant, which is found in the Earth in several places, particularly in sandy
Ground. It looks like Ivory both as to Colour and Grain. The common Opinion of
the Inhabitants is that they are real Elephants Teeth, and have lain buried
since the universal Deluge. Some of our Countrymen think it to be the Ebur
fossile, and consequently a Product of the Earth, which was likewise my Opinion
for a good while.
Here Müller uses the word "Mamant" only to
describe fossil ivory and not an animal. He says he did not initially think
that it came from an animal, rather that is was a mineral substance that
happened to resemble ivory. The phrase "Ebur fossile" is Latin for
"fossil ivory" and was used in Europe to indicate the tusks of mammoths
dug up in Germany and Italy as well as similar looking materials that could be
sold to apothecaries as unicorn horn.
The evolution of the word and idea of "mammoth"
almost exactly paralleled that of "fossil" following it by about
thirty years. Linné's inclusion of fossils into the category of minerals was
already becoming out of date in 1835 when he published Systema Naturae. He
stubbornly kept the mammoth there for another thirty years. Fossil ivory was
especially misplaced in his system as it is not petrified. It is nothing more
than buried ivory. Long before he published, the vast majority of literate
Europeans had come to accept that Ebur fossile was real ivory from real
animals, probably elephants. The mystery of the Siberian mammoth was that
elephants couldn't live in the North. So what kind of an animal was the
mammoth? Linné had an answer for that question. Mammoths are large walruses.
As far as Linné was concerned, the mammoth didn't need a
name because it already had a name: Phoca rosmarus. While his conclusion that
the mammoth was a walrus was generally ignored for the rest of the century (and
forever after), his decision not to name the mammoth held until the end of the
century. Then, Georges Cuvier took the step of proclaiming, once and for all,
that the mammoth was a distinct species and, furthermore, that it was extinct.
Three years later, Johann Blumenbach who had been thinking along the same lines
took the equally bold step of giving the mammoth a Linnaean style, binomial
name: Elphas primigenius.
The Russians were actually ahead of their Western colleagues
in understanding the mammoth until well into the Eighteenth Century. This was
not just because they owned the sources of mammoth ivory. Because Russia was
intellectually isolated from Europe until well into the Seventeenth Century,
they never went through a phase of doubting the organic origin of mammoth
ivory. The earliest record of some form of the word "mammoth" comes
from a monastery inventory for the year 1578. The word the brothers used
transliterates as "mamantovakos", which, except for the "n"
in the second syllable and "t" missing from the end, is the same as
Linné's "Mammatowacost". This term translates as "mammoth's
bone" or "bone of the mammoth". Rather than a separate word for
the ivory, it is the name of the animal that produced the ivory.
This usage, five years before the conquest of the Khanate of
Siberia, indicates that the Russians were already familiar with mammoth ivory
and the idea of a mammoth animal. The most recent linguistic research on the
word "mammoth" indicates that it comes from a word in the Mansi
language meaning "earth horn". That is, that it described just the
ivory and not the animal that it came from. It was the Russians who transformed
it into the name of an animal. After that transformation, it took over two
centuries for the West to accept that the mammoth was a distinct species and
give it a scientific name.
That's not the end of the story of the mammoth's name.
Blumenbach's binomial, Elphas primigenius, placed the mammoth in the same genus
as the elephant. In 1828, Joshua Brookes proposed giving the mammoth its own
genus renaming it Mammuthus primigenius. For the next century, the mammoth was
bounced in and out of different genera only finally settling into Brookes'
Mammuthus in the 1930s. By then, other species of mammoth had been discovered.
The woolly mammoth was joined in Mammuthus by a half-dozen other mammoths each
with its own name. Today, the latest DNA evidence raises the possibility that
different populations of woolly mammoth may have been distinct enough to be
called separate species, or subspecies. This will mean even more names.
Linné might have been annoyed by this, his judgment having
been overruled, or he might have been thrilled, if he had been able supply the
names. Perhaps we need to come up with special names for those two Linnés. I
propose Linnaeus dispepticus (archy 2013) and Linnaeus delectatus (archy 2013).
