Where's my mammelephant?

It seems that there is a rule that all news stories about woolly mammoths be framed around two questions: "what killed the mammoths" and "when will we be able to clone some new ones?" The answers are "bad luck" and and "not yet." Knowing the answers hasn't been enough to stop the endless repetition of the two questions.

There never can be a completely definitive answer to the first question. Even a written confession by the hunter who shoved a spear into the last mammoth leaves room for us to question whether that really was the last mammoth or if he just thought it was. We can never completely rule out the possibility that aliens vacuumed up most of the mammoths and left that poor hunter to take the blame. Uncertainty is is an inescapable part of all historical sciences. We've learned to live with it and so should you.

The second question has some interesting possibilities. Even if we never manage to do it, the "not yet" answer can stand forever. Just as we must allow that there is a vanishingly small, but never quite vanished, chance that even the most ridiculous explanation is possible in history, we must also allow that, in technology, the impossible is only impossible because we're not doing it right. There is always a remote chance that new information or a new philosophical approach will show that everything we believe is wrong and that yesterday's "obviously, it's impossible" is tomorrow's "I can't believe they were so blind." We have already cloned living animals and living animals from frozen cells. In theory, that means the biggest problem in cloning a mammoth should be finding some intact cells to clone.

Image source.
Mammoths could be revived in two ways. The first is simple in vitro fertilization. If we find a mammoth testicle (presumably attached to a mammoth, but you never know) that has a few sperm cells in it that were undamaged by freezing, we can use those sperms to fertilize an egg from an Indian elephant (genetically, the closest relative to a mammoth). We then impregnate the elephant and she carries the mammoth to term. The resulting baby is not really a mammoth, but rather a mammoth-elephant hybrid. With more mammoth sperm, we can impregnate the hybrid and produce ever more mammothy hybrids. Of course, if we are still working from our original supply of mammoth sperm, the hybrids will become increasingly inbred. In time we will have almost pure mammoth, but they will be really stupid.

The other plan is true cloning. For this we can use any cell from a mammoth. We remove the nucleus from the cell and use it replace the nucleus of an egg cell from an Indian elephant. We start the cell dividing by electrically or chemically shocking it. We then place the mammoth blastocyst in an elephant surrogate mother who gives birth to a genetically pure mammoth eighteen months later. Two variations on this method involve building our own mammoth DNA to place in the nucleus of an elephant egg. This is done by reassembling the fragments of DNA that we normally find in frozen mammoth tissue or by going over an elephant genome and modifying all 400,000 places where it differs from a mammoth genome.

As much as I would love to have my own pet mammoth, I know I will never see one. The big flaw in both plans is that we have never found any type of mammoth cells that weren't damaged by freezing, let alone fertile mammoth sperm. The two variants on plan B involve a level of genetic manipulation that is beyond our ability at the moment. Technologies of that sort always turn out to be harder to achieve than the sounded in theory. We probably will be able to assemble DNA bit by bit someday, but I strongly doubt I will live to see them assembling extinct animals using that method.

Some people worry about the ethics of recreating a mammoth. The mammoth's world is gone. The environment in which it flourished has vanished. I don't mean the ice age. Woolly mammoths evolved several ice ages ago and survived through several interglacial periods similar to the one we are living through today. What's missing is the mammoth steppe, the Arctic grassland that sustained mammoths. I'm less worried about that. Colombian mammoths lived in environments similar to those still found in parts of North America. Woolly mammoths should be able to adopt to one of those. If they can't, it is possible to recreate the mammoth steppe. For over twenty years, a Russian wildlife biologist, Sergey Zimov has been doing just that at a reserve in the northeastern corner of the Sakha Republic (that's Yakutia to you Risk players). The plan is, that by recreating an animal assemblage made up of analogs of the animals that lived there during the Pleistocene, the animals will do the work of selecting plants until the mammoth steppe has been recreated. Beyond simply being an interesting experiment, Zimov's Pleistocene park has the very real application of serving as a refuge for Asian animals that are endangered in their current range. Candidates include saiga antelope, Tibetan antelope, Amur leopard, and the Siberian tiger.

There is final reason why I'm quite sure I will never see a mammoth. Even if we manage to produce a genetically correct, living mammoth using one of these methods, it still will not be a real mammoth. Animals are a product of their environment. Genetics is only one factor in making an animal. Zimov's Pleistocene park ecology will only approximate the real thing. However, I won't make too much of a fuss over that. The mammoth steppe wasn't unchanging. Pleistocene park is close enough. My objection is that, however genetically correct a reconstructed mammoth is, and however close its environment is to the original, the nurture part of the nurture vs. nature equation can never be replaced. A reconstructed mammoth will have to be raised by an elephant. However well intentioned the elephant is, she can only teach the mammoth how to be a mammoth. Without time travel, we can never have a real mammoth; we can only have an almost-mammoth.

Not that I would turn one down.

Note: I was inspired to write this after reading a nice post that Brian Switek wrote about the first great mammoth cloning controversy. Go read it.

Naming the mammoth

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).

A zombie mammoth bites the dust

A few years back, I mentioned the mammoth book actually was a byproduct of my love of fringe theories. A lo-o-ong time ago, when I was a teenager, I noticed that each fringe genre recycled a standard set of evidences that were proof positive of each writer's preferred theory. For geological catastrophists, frozen mammoths were right at the top of the list. Working in bookstores in my late twenties and early thirties, I played a game of find-the-mammoth with each new catastrophist book. Very few failed. An important part of the theory was the idea that mammoths had been frozen so fast that its meat was still fresh and delicious tasting. This week, one of those stories about mammoth meat was decisively debunked--not that that will make it go away.

In the 1690s, the literate classes of Western Europe became aware of ivory from a mysterious Siberian creature called mamant or mammoth. The natives said it was never seen alive. They belived it lived underground and died when it breathed surface air by accidentally tunneling out of its subterranean home, usually on river banks. They believed it was a currently living animal because the meat was fresh enough for their dogs to eat. None of these stories said that they ate the meat. And, dogs will eat their own shit, so that's not the best recommendation for the palatability of the meat. This detail, the freshness of the meat, was one of the things that made the mammoth so fascinating, more than any other extinct animal, and kept attention focused on it for the next century.

Once the mammoth was recognized, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a unique, extinct species, native to the North, more focus was placed on just how it came to be frozen. During the previous century, this was not a particularly difficult question. The mammoth was an elephant. During the biblical Deluge, they drowned and their corpses were washed north. When the waters receded, the now Arctic elephants rapidly froze. This theory fell into disfavor as the general literary consensus tipped toward viewing the Deluge as a metaphor or local event in the Middle East. On the geological side, the concept of uniformitarianism, that major changes happen very slowly, in small increments, also denied the idea of a sudden, global flood. This was immediately followed by the discovery of the ice ages. A slow warming and cooling world provided many opportunities for mammoths to become frozen.

Back to the mammoth. By 1850, only fourteen mammoths with some soft tissue attached had been reported since 1692, only four were supposed to have been relatively complete, and only one had been recovered. This made it easy to believe that each frozen mammoth was due to a rare and unique accident. Today, after 350 years, only seventy-five mammoths with soft tissue have been reported and only fourteen have been relatively complete. Due to global communication, the end of the Cold War, a rapid erosion of of local superstitions, and an appreciation of the high monetary value of mammoth carcasses, a third of those complete carcasses were reported and all of them recovered in the last ten years.

But, John, you may be asking (go ahead, ask), when did the mammoth feast enter the mythology? That's a very good question. I commend you on your persip... perisap... smartness. As I mentioned, the earliest reports of mammoth meat only mention dogs eating it. Dogs eating the meat are mentioned again a couple times in the nineteenth century. But, by the dawn of the twentieth century, I can't find a single account of humans eating it, let alone it being the main course of a great feast.

Back to catastophism. Frozen mammoths are now a staple of catastrophist theories. Frozen mammoths are among the usual suspects that catastrophists trot out to prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth’s axis can suddenly change location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of Egypt, some cosmological event dumped millions of cubic miles of ice on the earth, or that the Deluge was real. When any new catastrophist theory is proposed, frozen mammoths cannot be far behind. The mammoth most often cited, though often anonymously cited and turned into a plural, is the mammoth discovered on the Beresovka River in 1900.

This mammoth was only the second complete mammoth to be recovered. It was found halfway down a high bluff over the Beresovka River in northeastern Siberia. Its claims to fame are based on the date of its discovery and its high degree of preservation. It was only the second relatively complete mammoth recovered; the first was a century earlier. It was better documented than the first. Mikhail Adams, who recovered the first mammoth in 1806, was a botanist who quickly lost interest in it. The main documentation of it was written by the person who reconstructed the skeleton, Wilhelm Tilesius, who hated Adams. By contrast, the Beresovka mammoth was recovered by Otto Herz and Eugene Pfitzenmayer, who both were interested in the mammoth itself and respected each other. Finally, they wrote during a time when the interested audience for information about such discoveries was magnitudes larger than the audience for the Adams mammoth. They not only wrote several scientific articles on the discovery, the samples they brought back allowed other scientists to write papers on it. Pfitzenmayer even wrote a popular book on mammoths. Quite simply, the world knew more about this mammoth than any discovered before then and any since until Dima in 1977.

From here, the details of this mammoth move into catastophist literature following two paths. The first is because of the high quality of the remains themselves. The flesh and even parts of the organs were recognizably intact. Plant tissues from its last meal were still in its mouth and identifiable nearly a century before DNA sequencing. All of these details have led catastrophists to believe the mammoth was frozen suddenly and completely. An entire industry has grown up around this belief. Someday, I'll go over all the details of that, but, today, let's go over the small aspect of that belief that was debunked this week.

Catastrophism means suddenness. The significance of the Beresovka mammoth to catastophists is the idea that the perfection of its preservation was due to its being frozen in a few hours--faster than any known means of freezing. One line of thought using the Beresovka mammoth was based on the supposedly non-arctic food found in its unflossed mouth. The other is based on the quality of its meat. Twice now I've mentioned that several recorded accounts, before 1901, mention dogs eating the meat, but none mention humans eating it. So, did Herz or Pfitzenmayer make this claim about their mammoth? No, they did not.

The origin appears to have come from Herz' comment that the mammoth's flesh "looks as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat." This has been taken to mean it tasted like well-frozen beef or horse meat. It did not. Pfitzenmayer wrote that they could smell it a mile away and that they initially could only work on excavating it for a few minutes before fleeing to get some fresh air. Though it's not mentioned in either of their initial accounts. One of them did taste the meat.* One night, toward the end of their work, they got drunk and began daring the other to eat come of the meat. The dogs had shown that it wasn't fatal to eat (see dogs and shit, above). Finally, fortified with a lot of vodka and pepper, one of them was able to chew up a chunk of mammoth, but not swallow it.

Before I adjudge this story to be the origin of all mammoth feast stories, I want to suggest the possibility of an undocumented oral tradition that also fed into it. I'm an Alaskan. Many old, white Alaskans have a grandfather, know someone who had a grandfather, or whose grandfather knew someone who regularly ate frozen mammoth. The Seattle catastophist Donald Patton wrote that "mammoth steaks have even been featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks." None of these stories has been documented as true. All of these stories date back to the gold rush days. None of the Russians before then make that claim, none of the Anglo-white guys since then make that claim, and I've never met an Alaskan native that makes that claim. My opinion is that all of these stories are based on sourdoughs (old white Alaskans) BSing cheechakos (newcomers).

And now, after many digressions and distractions, I've finally arrived at the great mammoth feast. In 1920, Martin Gardner published A Journey to the Earth's Interior, Or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? His book is the most mature development of the hollow earth theory. The central idea of this theory is that the surface of the earth is a bubble with an empty space inside. The earliest western development of this idea was by Edmond Halley of comet fame. Various later versions developed ideas of what was inside. Gardner watched the many attempts during his life to reach the poles and decided it was not possible because there were no poles. When explorers reached a certain high latitude, they entered a hole that led to the interior world. Gravity held people against the under side of the bubble and a tiny sun balanced at the center made life possible there. When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Pellucidar based on the same idea, Gardner wrote to him asking if he had anything to do with the books. I don't know if Burroughs answered.

Gardner, for once, did not need the biblical flood or any other type of catastrophe to put frozen mammoths in the Arctic. Like most catastrophists, he believed that mammoths were normal tropical elephants whose appearance in the Arctic needed explanation. His solution was that they lived in the eternal tropics of the inner world. Occasionally, however, they would fall into rivers or off the northern coast, drown, have their bodies carried through the polar hole, be deposited on the Siberian coast, buried, and frozen there before they could decompose--obviously.

Gardner dedicated an entire chapter to the mammoth and within that chapter, a subtitled section to the mammoth feast. Gardner specifically says it was Herz who held a banquet with meat from the Berezovka mammoth "and he asked scientists in other parts of the world to contribute other ancient foods--such as corn dug up from the ruins of Egyptian cities." Later versions of the story have added that Tsar Nicholas II was the guest of honor. Other versions of the feast removed Herz from the story and made Guillaume Apollinaire, the Italian/French poet, the guest of honor. Later, when asked about the feast, Gardner would only vaguely say, it was in all the papers, look it up yourselves.

This, Klondike tall tales, and other rumors established the popular legend that, at some time, there had been a feast or dinner of mammoth steaks. Thirty years later, a newer version appeared: at some point, soon after WWII, the Explorer's Club of New York featured mammoth steaks on the menu of its annual dinner. Oddly, this story, with its exactness, has not been repeated as often as Gardner's vague story. But there is some truth to this story, the Explorer's Club is a real organization, it is in New York, and it has a fancy dinner with exotic fare every year. Despite this story having so many verifiable points, I have never come across a catastrophist who looked onto it enough to verify the fact of the mammoth steaks. But, academic rigor has never been a feature of fringe thought; recycling is their primary feature. After sixty-five years, someone has finally looked into this factoid.

Here is the story as reconstructed by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis, Timothy J. Walsh, Eric J. Sargis, and Adalgisa Caccone in an article in PLOS One. The famous menu was the from the 1951 annual Explorers Club dinner, held in January that year. The source of the popularization of the story is an article in The Christian Science Monitor that appeared several days later. The first point they make completely kills the legend. The menu didn't say mammoth; it said Megatherium, which is an extinct species of South American giant ground sloth that did not live in the far north. Although this might disappoint catastrophists, in its way, it is much more interesting. Megatherium remains are far rarer than mammoths and, as it is not an Arctic species, well preserved soft tissue would have been insanely rare. If only there was some way to prove that.

There is. Paul Griswold Howes, the curator of the Bruce Museum missed the dinner. Wendell Phillips Dodge, the chairman of the club, was good enough to save a piece of the Megatherium for Howes. Rather than eat the tasty bit, Howes preserved it and added it to the museum's collections. Dodge was rather--well--dodgy about the origin of the meat. Originally, he claimed it came from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. If true, this would have extended the range of the Megatherium by over 10,000 miles. He is also reported to have said he had discovered a formula by which he could convert sea turtle meat into giant sloth meat. I think we can assume that formula included a generous helping of bullshit.

Spoiler: It's not mammoth meat (source)

Glass et al. have the tools to go beyond merely determining that the meat was not mammoth. They were able to determine what it really was. All they needed was the sample that Howes stored at the Bruce Museum. Howes carefully labeled the sample so it wasn't difficult to find. The meat had been cooked and stored in isopropyl alcohol, but this didn't prevent them from extracting DNA for identification. Unlike forensic crime dramas, they weren't able to determine that it was a near-sighted, left-handed, yellow sloth from a bad part of Davenport, Iowa. However, they were able to determine that it wasn't a mammoth or any kind of sloth. It was, in fact, a green sea turtle of a sub-species native to the Pacific Ocean. They weren't able to narrow it down further than that. The green sea turtle is now an endangered species. In those days it was a favored species for making turtle soup, a major factor in its becoming endangered.

Although it's easy to dismiss the mammoth feast as so much fringe silliness, it has had a very real effect on how the public perceives mammoths. The idea that there is almost perfect mammoth tissue available in the Siberian tundra is one of the drivers of the idea that each new discovery might provide the necessary genetic material to clone a mammoth. Hundreds of frozen mammals have been in the northern tundra. None of them have provided decent DNA for cloning.

This isn't the end of the story. In 1979 a prospector near Fairbanks uncovered the frozen remains of a steppe bison. Rather than try to blast the thing clear, he reported it to the University of Alaska and R. Dale Guthrie was able to conduct a proper excavation of it. It is one of the best preserved Pleistocene mammals ever recovered. It was brought to the university and, along with being properly examined, the main parts of the body were prepared for display in the museum. The chief taxidermist, Erick Grandqvist, saved a piece of meat from the Bison's neck. When his work was done, he Guthrie, and visiting paleontologist, Björn Kurtén made a stew out of it. The meat was tough, but edible.

Zombies of the mammoth steppes

The problem with the internet, we are told, is that it has no standards and no controls. Anything that is written will be recycled endlessly, regardless of whether it is true or not. There is no way to correct bad information on the internet. This is why the internet is inferior to traditional media. At least that's what we're told.

In the three hundred years since Europeans first received reports of a mysterious creature in Siberia called the mammoth, nothing has engendered more public fascination about them than the occasional discovery of nearly intact, frozen mammoth carcasses with flesh still attached. At some point in the nineteenth century, frozen mammoths became a staple of catastrophist theories. As one of the usual suspects, frozen mammoths have regularly been trotted out to prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth's axis can suddenly change location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of Egypt, or that Noah's global flood was real. Sometimes they prove all of the above.

Three particular mammoths show up more often that all of the others combined. The Adams mammoth, named for the person who excavated it, was discovered in 1799 near the mouth of the Lena River. In 1807, Michael Adams journeyed to the spot and recovered most of the skeleton and several hundred pounds of skin and hair. This was the first nearly complete mammoth recovered and scientifically described. It was the basis for all nineteenth century ideas about what a mammoth looked like in life. The Berezovka mammoth, named after the place where it was found in 1901, was also nearly complete. Since scientists were able to get to it soon after its discovery, they were able to examine the tissues and remains of some of the internal organs. In between the Adams and the Berezovka was the Benkendorf mammoth. In 1846 a surveying party, led by a Lt. Benkendorf, discovered a complete mammoth exposed by a flood of the Indigirka river. Before the mammoth was carried away, the party was able to make some measurements and examine the contents of the mammoth's stomach. The main difference between these three famous mammoths is that the Adams and Berezovka mammoths are real, while the Benkendorf mammoth is a complete fiction. The story of Benkendorf's discovery originally appeared in a fairly obscure 1859 German book of science for young people, Kosmos für die Jugend by an author named Philipp Körber.

The fictitious nature of the story hasn't hurt its popularity. In In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood Dr. Walt Brown cites the Benkendorf mammoth in to prove his version of the Noachian flood. John Cogan, in The New Order of Man's History, cites the same mammoth to prove his theory of Atlantis being sunk by a giant asteroid strike. Robert W. Felix cites the Benkendorf mammoth in Not by Fire but by Ice to prove his theory that magnetic pole reversals cause sudden and regular ice ages. In Darwin's Mistake: Antediluvian Discoveries Prove Dinosaurs and Humans Co-Existed, Hans J. Zillmer calls on the same mammoth to disprove both evolution and modern geology.

It's easy to point and laugh at the creationists and catastrophists for being suckered into believing that a fictional mammoth would support their theories. Recycling anecdotes is a well established tradition among conspiracy theorists and other purveyors of forbidden knowledge. Unfortunately, the Benkendorf mammoth has just as long a history of being cited in textbooks, popular science writing, and even academic papers. Samuel Sharp's 1876 textbook Rudiments of Geology uses the Benkendorf mammoth as a source of information about the appearance and diet of mammoths as do the authors of the 1902 edition of The Cambridge Natural History, H. H. Lamb's 1977 book Climate: Present, Past and Future,and a 1983 Time-Life book, Ice Ages. As recently as 2002, Donald R. Prothero and Robert M. Schoch gave two pages to Benkendorf in their Horns, Tusks, and Flippers: the Evolution of Hoofed Mammals.

Why has the Körber story managed to survive so long? More than anything else, I believe three elements have come together to turn Benkendorf's mammoth into a nearly unstoppable zombie. First, the original story was well told, filled with many plausible details, and included the solutions to some outstanding mysteries about mammoths. Probably because of the verisimilitude and answers, the story was adopted and retold in considerable detail by some very influential scientists. Their credibility led to many retellings in both the popular and scientific press. Finally, debunkings of the story have been weak, made by not credible writers, or located in hard to find places.

The story of the discovery is told in the form of a letter to a German friend written by Lt. Benkendorf, an engineer in command of a steam ship surveying the Siberian coast and deltas of the Lena and Indigirka rivers. As the story opens, Benkendorf is taking the ship up the Indigirka to a place where he is to meet a troop of Yakuti horsemen.

In 1846 there was unusually warm weather in the north of Siberia. Already in May unusual rains poured over the moors and bogs, storms shook the earth, and the streams carried not only ice to the sea, but also large tracts of land thawed by the masses of warm water fed by the southern rains.... We steamed on the first favourable day up the Indigirka; but there were no thoughts of land, we saw around us only a sea of dirty brown water, and knew the river only by the rushing and roaring of the stream. The river rolled against us trees, moss, and large masses of peat, so that it was only with great trouble and danger that we could proceed.

[...]

Suddenly our jager, ever on the outlook, called loudly, and pointed to a singular and unshapely object, which rose and sank through the disturbed waters.

I had already remarked it, but not given it any attention, considering it only driftwood. Now we all hastened to the spot on the shore, had the boat drawn near, and waited until the mysterious thing should again show itself. Our patience was tried, but at last a black, horrible, giant-like mass was thrust out of the water, and we beheld a colossal elephant's head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in the water in an unearthly manner, as though seeking for something lost therein. Breathless with astonishment, I beheld the monster hardly twelve feet from me, with his half-open eyes yet showing the whites. It was still in good preservation.

Benkendorf's crew secure the mammoth with ropes and chains and try to pull it to the shore, but its rear feet are frozen to the ground and they can't budge it. Refusing to give up, Benkendorf has them tie the ropes to stakes driven into the riverbank and waits for the river to excavate the mammoth for him. The next day, the Yakuti horsemen arrive and Benkendorf puts them to work reeling in his catch.

Picture to yourself an elephant with the body covered with thick fur, about thirteen feet in height and fifteen in length, with tusks eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends, a stout trunk of six feet in length, colossal limbs of one and a half feet in thickness, and a tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair. The animal was fat and well grown; death had overtaken him in the fulness of his powers. His parchment-like, large, naked ears lay fearfully turned up over the head; about the shoulders and the back he had stiff hair about a foot in length, like a mane. The long outer hair was deep brown, and coarsely rooted. The top of the head looked so wild, and so penetrated with pitch, that it resembled the rind of an old oak tree. On the sides it was cleaner, and under the outer hair there appeared everywhere a wool, very soft, warm, and thick, and of a fallow-brown colour. The giant was well protected against the cold. The whole appearance of the animal was fearfully strange and wild. It had not the shape of our present elephants. As compared with our Indian elephants, its head was rough, the brain-case low and narrow, but the trunk and mouth were much larger. The teeth were very powerful. Our elephant is an awkward animal, but compared with this Mammoth, it is as an Arabian steed to a coarse, ugly, dray-horse. I could not divest myself of a feeling of fear as I approached the head; the broken, widely-opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy us with a roar....

The bad smell of the body warned us that it was time to save of it what we could, and the swelling flood, too, bid us hasten. First of all we cut off the tusks, and sent them to the cutter. Then the people tried to hew off the head, but notwithstanding their good will, this work was slow. As the belly of the animal was cut open the intestines rolled out, and then the smell was so dreadful that I could not overcome my nauseousness, and was obliged to turn away. But I had the stomach separated, and brought on one side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....

So intent are they in examining the mammoth that no one notices the river slowly undermining the riverbank. Suddenly, the mammoth is snatched from Benkendof's hands as the bank collapses taking the mammoth and five of the horsemen with it. Sailors from the ship manage to rescue the horsemen, but the mammoth is irretrievably lost.

Besides being a ripping good yarn, Körber's story had a lot going for it. At the time, only one fairly intact mammoth had been recovered and described in scientific literature. This was the Adams mammoth. Adams was able to recover an almost complete skeleton, a large part of the skin, and several bags of hair. However, most of the soft tissue had been eaten by scavengers, the tusks had been cut off and sold, and the hair had shed from the skin. This left the angle of the tusks and the distribution of the hair open to speculation. With no internal organs present, Adams could provide no information about what the mammoth ate. This was an area of great interest since knowing its diet would be a major clue about the past climate of the Arctic coast. Adams' account of recovering the mammoth was published in several languages. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius reassembled the skeleton and published an exact description of it along with large detailed illustrations. Both Adams' and Tilesius' papers were broadly circulated and well known even in the popular press. Körber's description of Benkendorf's mammoth stuck closely to Adams' and Tilesius' descriptions, even where they made incorrect guesses.

Körber describes the tusks as "eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends." This follows Tilesius' attempt at reconstructing the placement of the tusks on the Adams' mammoth. The original tusks had been cut off and sold before Adams reached the mammoth (in fact, it was the ivory merchant who reported the find). Adams bought a pair of tusks on his way back from the coast and claimed they were the originals. Whether he was conned by the ivory merchants or let his own wishful thinking blind him is not clear. These tusks were from a younger, smaller mammoth than the one Adams excavated. Tilesius could only guess at their placement and put them on the wrong sides of the skull with the points curving out and back over the mammoth's shoulders. In part, because of Tilesius' incorrect guess and Körber's confirmation of it, the correct placement of the tusks would still be a topic of debate into the first decade of the twentieth century.


Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius' reconstruction of the Adams' mammoth skeleton. Tilesius' work on the body was very accurate. However, since he didn't have the original tusks to work with he was reduced to guesswork on that detail and put the two that he tried to use on the wrong sides. While Tilesius had the tusks curve out and back, a real mammoth's tusks curve down and out, then up and back inward, with the tips actually crossing on an old male. Nineteenth century naturalists expected the tusks to be better weapons than they really were. Tilesius' mistake wouldn't be corrected until 1899 and not generally accepted for another decade.

The idea that the hair on the mammoth should be in the form of a mane, rather than equally distributed about the body, comes from Adams. Adams described the mammoth, when he first viewed it, as having "a long mane on the neck." By the time Adams reached St. Petersburg, all of the hair had fallen off of the skin. Since Adams says most of the hair had fallen off by the time he reached the mammoth, it might be that the only hair he saw still attached was around the neck and shoulders. In any case, this was another incorrect assumption that gained support from Körber's tale.

Körber provided two other details about the mammoth's appearance that were bad guesses. The "tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair" is a nice detail that goes along with the lion-like mane. On Adams' mammoth, the tail had been carried off by scavengers; its appearance was anybody's guess. The "parchment-like, large, naked ears" are a convincing detail that make his mammoth more elephant-like. When Adams began excavating his mammoth, most of the flesh and the skin of the head had been eaten by scavengers. However, one side of the head was still buried and had preserved its skin and ear. Adams mentioned only that ear was "furnished with a tuft of fur." By the time the skin reached St. Petersburg, the ear had dried out and was too damaged for Tilesius to draw any conclusions about its original appearance.


Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' famous illustration, published in 1859, makes the same assumptions as Körber about the placement of the mammoth's tusks, big ears, mane, and lions tuft at the end its tail. At the time, these details were being challenged by naturalists to no avail.

While all of these external details were corrected by the early years of the twentieth century, Körber's imaginative description of the contents of the mammoth's stomach is a important bit of misinformation that persists to this day.

I had the stomach separated, and brought on one side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....

We can be fairly certain that Körber didn't set out to fool the scientific community. His book was intended for young people with an interest in science. Unfortunately, this one detail, taken as a scientific observation, had consequences in several fields. At the time, discovering what the mammoth ate was considered the most important evidence as to the environment in which it lived. Naturalists were divided between those who thought elephants in the Arctic meant Siberia had had a warm climate in the recent past, and those who thought mammoths were adapted to the cold, meaning Siberia's cold climate had never changed.* The answer to the question had great implications for understanding the nature of the mammoth, the nature of the ice ages, and whether or not geological and climatological conditions changed gradually or catastrophically.

As with the physical appearance of the mammoth, Körber's speculation about the diet of the mammoth was based on solid science. In one of the earliest attempts at debunking the Benkendorf story, Johann Friedrich von Brandt pointed out that the description of the mammoth's diet accorded very closely with his own research into woolly rhinoceroses. He went on ,rather testily, to accuse Körber with stealing his ideas on how mammoths and rhinoceroses came to be frozen in Siberia. When Körber's book went to press in 1859, the only account of Brandt's research into woolly rhinoceroses was a letter published in the journal of the Royal Prussian Academy in 1846. The key passage it this:

I have been so fortunate as to extract from cavities in the molar teeth of the Wiljui rhinoceros a small quantity of its half-chewed food, among which fragments of pine leaves, one-half of the seed of a polygonaceous plant, and very minute portions of wood with porous cells (or small fragments of coniferous wood), were still recognizable.

It's certainly possible that Körber was familiar with Brandt's letter. The original was published in his native language, German. It was also published in one of the most influential geology books of the century, Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, from the 1853 edition forward.

Brandt may have been right in suspecting that his letter was the source of Körber's supposition, but Körber had another source available to him. In 1805, a mastodon skeleton was discovered in Virginia by workmen digging a well. Word of the discovery made it to Bishop James Madison. In a letter to Benjamin Smith Barton, Madison described the most important part of the discovery:

It is now no longer a question, whether the [mastodon] was a herbivorous or carnivorous animal.** Human industry has revealed a secret, which the bosom of the earth had, in vain, attempted to conceal. In digging a well, near a Salt-Lick, in Wythe-county, Virginia, after penetrating about five feet and a half from the surface, the labourers struck upon the stomach of a mammoth. The contents were in a state of perfect preservation, consisting of half masticated reeds, twigs, and grass, or leaves. There could be no deception; the substances were designated by obvious characters, which could not be mistaken, and of which every one could judge; besides, the bones of the animal lay around, and added a silent, but sure, confirmation.

Barton was an influential scientist in his own right and the publisher of the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Barton not only published Bishop Madison's letter, he forwared it to Baron Georges Cuvier who quoted it in his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes. Like Lyell's Geology, Recherches was an enormously influential book that went through numerous editions. Even before the first edition of Recherches was published, American readers knew that the story was wrong. In 1809, Madison wrote to several of the American journals that had published his letter to say that his sources had exaggerated. It was true that the vegetable matter was found inside the skeleton of the mastodon, but it was no different from the vegetable matter in the soil surrounding the skeleton. Unfortunately, no one thought to tell Cuvier and the misinformation was repeated in every edition of Recherches.

The story of the Benkendorf mammoth made it into academic and popular science literature in the early 1860s, just a few years after the publication of Körber's book. By the end of the century, some of the details were so well established that they had could stand up against newer, and more correct, data. A mammoth well enough preserved that it still had its stomach matter intact wasn't discovered until 1901 when the Berezovka mammoth was found. Otto Herz recovered thirty-five pounds of plant matter from the mammoth's stomach and mouth, which turned out to be meadow grasses and not conifers. However, when the final analysis of this material was published in 1914, the author, V. N. Sukachev, almost apologetically wrote that his conclusions gave "no particular reasons for distrusting Benkendorf's testimony." The two diets have continued side by side to this day creating confusion about the nature of the mammoth's habitat.

How is it that the educated guesses in a children's science book gained such credibility? For that, the responsibility lies with two prestigious scientists who reprinted Körber's tale and by the weakness of the efforts to debunk it.

On 26 November 1842, twenty-seven year old Alexander von Middendorff left St. Petersburg for Siberia. Middendorff had been hired by the Academy of Sciences to investigate the phenomena of permafrost and conduct a survey of the flora and fauna of the Taymyr Peninsula. His tiny expedition included three other scientists, four Cossacks, and a Nenets interpreter. The expedition was brutal--Middendorff suffered freezing, starving, and severe depression--but ultimately was successful. Before returning to St. Petersburg, Middendorff mounted a second expedition to the Sea of Okhotsk and ascended the Amur River.Leaving one of his companions behind to continue gathering data in Yakutsk, he returned to the capital in 1845 as something of a scientific celebrity. Middendorff's letters from the field were published in the journal of the Academy and a short report was written based on the letters. The Emperor found the report quite interesting and gave all of the scientists medals and pensions. There is no word whether the Cossacks or the interpreter received any reward for their parts. Middendorff then settled down to write the formal analysis of the data they had gathered. It took him thirty years. I'm sure any graduate student will empathize.

Middendorff found the remains of a mammoth while he was on the Taymyr Peninsula. Immediately upon returning to St. Petersburg, he began to collect information about other discoveries of mammoth carcasses. Lyell included some information from Middendorff in the 1847 edition of his Geology. Middendorff wrote a long article on mammoths in 1860 as a warm up to his official report on his own find. This appeared in 1867. Along with the details of his own find, Middendorff included an historical survey of previous finds with the entire Benkendorf letter. This is the ultimate source of the transition of Körber's tale from the realm of fiction into the realm of fact.

It appears to me that Körber's tale came to Middendoff's attention because of Johann Brandt's debunking of it. Middendorff and Brandt were colleagues and friends. At the same time Middendorff was writing the volume of his researches that included his mammoth, Brandt published, in a popular Russian magazine, an article on mammoths that concluded with his debunking of Körber. Brandt was upset because he believed Körber had stolen his theories on the mammoth's diet and how mammoth carcasess came to be preserved. Brandt was quite emphatic in his rejection of the Benkendorf story: "[T]he whole story of Benkendorf is pure lie and invention. The expedition to the Indigirka never took place and could not take place because of the impenetrable masses of ice of the Arctic Ocean; Benckendorf is a work of imagination."

If Middendorff learned of Körber's tale from Brandt, he should also have known of Brandt's objections. For Middendorff, the most telling evidence of the story's fictitious nature should have been the sheer magnitude of Benkendorf's expedition. Middendorff's expedition to the Taymyr was made up of a mere four scientists, four Cossacks, and an interpreter. The idea that a fully crewed steam cutter and fifty Yakuti horsemen could have been dispatched to the same region a mere three years later must have sounded to Middendorff like fiction, and bad fiction at that. When Middendorff copied the Benkendorf letter into his report, he added a warning to his readers that they shouldn't put too much faith in the account:

Since we know the birthday of the enterprising countryman of mine to whom we owe this extraordinary discovery, because we have before us his life's story and the story of his expedition down to the minor details, there would seem to be no doubt about this wonderful discovery. The real and invented are so cheekily woven together here that it is worthy of a place along side la Martiniere's fanatsy of Novaya Zemlya [a famous seventeenth century hoax] that persisted for so long. But I do not deprive my readers of the pleasure of reading this.

This is far from Brandt's uncompromising rejection of the story. Middendorff went further in qualifying his rejection. Following the account, he wrote:

We can only hope that at some time in the future the author will publish this episode himself and describe many other adventures and occurrences experiences seen by him during his travels in Siberia. We are happy that at least a small grain from his rich store of information has come down to us.

Middendorff seems to have thought that the Benkendorf letter, as published, was a generously embellished account of a real discovery. Regardless of what he may have thought, such nuance and his various caveats were completely missed by later authors. Although Middendorff started out as an unknown teacher on a small research expedition, the quality of the monographs based on his research made him a well respected authority within a very short time after his return. Scientists all over Europe and the Americas eagerly awaited new papers and carefully studied each one, though, in this case, not as carefully as they should have.


Alexander Theodor von Middendorff: Was it all his fault?

Middendorff's reports were published in German and have never been translated into English except in fragments used by English speaking scientists in their own works. William Boyd Dawkins was one of those scientists and the person most responsible for introducing Benkendorf to the English speaking world and for lending credibility to the story. Dawkins was an influential British geologist who became involved in debates over the antiquity of man, labor rights, and the channel tunnel. It was the first of those that got him interested in mammoths.

In 1868, within a few months of Middendorff's monograph being published, Dawkins referred to it in an article entitled "On the Range of the Mammoth" published in Popular Science Review. Dawkins included almost the entire text of the Benkendorf letter (in his own translation). He introduced the letter with "The fourth and by far the most important discovery of a body is described by an eye-witness of its resurrection; so valuable in its bearings that we translate it at some length." Dawkins went on to emphasize the importance of the apocryphal stomach contents:

This most graphic account affords a key for the solution of several problems hitherto unknown. It is clear that the animal must have been buried where it died, and that it was not transported from any place further up stream, to the south, where the climate is comparatively temperate. The presence of fir in the stomach proves that it fed on the vegetation which is now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low, desolate, treeless, moss-covered tundra, in which the body lay buried—a fact that would necessarily involve the conclusion that the climate of Siberia, in those ancient days, differed but slightly from that of the present time. Before this discovery the food of the Mammoth had not been known by direct evidence.

For the English speaking world, this was the moment that the genie escaped the bottle. Dawkins either didn't notice Middendorff's qualifications or didn't understand their significance. Because Dawkins was a scientist of some prominence, other scientists and writers felt safe in following his lead. During the last part of the nineteenth century, dozens of writers made reference to the Benkendorf mammoth on Dawkins' authority.


Professor Sir William Boyd Dawkins: Was it all his fault?

After 1868, the story of the Benkendorf mammoth took off with a roar while attempts to debunk it, or even to make qualifications, as Middendorff did, gained no traction whatsoever. Brandt's debunking was published in a Russian language popular magazine and went almost entirely unnoticed. It was mentioned in 1867 in the Bulletin de la Société impériale des naturalistes de Moscou by Alexander Brandt, who wanted to assure his readers that there was no feud between Middendorff and Johann Brandt, and again in 1958 by B. A. Tikhomirov. I know of no other reference to Brandt's debunking during the intervening ninety-one years. Neither Middendorf nor Brandt made any effort to correct the misinformation being spread.

There was nothing extraordinary about the paper on mammoth extinction that Henry H. Howorth read at the 1869 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Howarth reviewed the unanswered questions about the mammoth and its environment, and proposed a catastrophic flood to account for both their extinction and the ice age (it was a common belief, at the time, that the mammoths went extinct before the ice age, not after). Howarth's flood theory was well within the mainstream of geologic thought at the time. Over the next decade he established himself as a solid figure in politics and as an historian. In the early 1880s, however, he began to develop his flood ideas in a series of articles published in Geological Magazine. In these, he took a more strident tone and denounced the uniformist orthodoxy of the geological community and what he called "the extreme Glacial views of [Louis] Agassiz." In 1887 he organized his ideas into a book, The Mammoth and the Flood. Two other books on his catastrophic ideas followed.

Howorth did not believe the Benkendorf story. In the first of his articles of the 1880s, Howorth revealed that he was familiar with several pieces that referenced Benkendorf, but he ignored the story. In fact, he went so far as to say, "I am not aware that the contents of the stomach of any Siberian Mammoth have been hitherto examined." In an article in 1882, Howorth directly took on Benkendorf:

This notice has always seemed to me to be most suspicious. ... I confess my suspicions were not allayed when I found [Middendorff] had obtained it ... from a boy's book. ... It is very strange that if genuine no accounts of this discovery should have reached the ears of Baer or Brandt, Schmidt or Schrenck, who none of them mention it, and that it should be first heard of in a popular book for boys in [1859].

Howorth repeated his suspicions in The Mammoth and the Flood. Since 1869, the scientific community had moved away from catastrophism, and Howarth's theories were dismissed as an eccentric hobby horse of an otherwise reputable politician. It would be easy to say that because of that, no one noticed his appraisal of the Benkendorf story. However, despite the rejection of his geological theories, Howarth's book continued to be read for his encyclopedic history of mammoth discoveries. His suspicions about Benkendorf are smack in the middle of this history, and yet generations of researchers have managed to miss them.

Perhaps the most frustrating semi-debunking of Körber's story came in 1929. I. A. Tolmachoff's "Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros in Siberia" is a classic of mammoth paleontology. In it, Tolmachoff described all of the finds of mammoths with flesh still attached. His count of thirty-nine is still sometimes repeated, as is his map of their locations In fact, the count is now up to around one hundred and his thirty-nine carcasses included four rhinoceroses. Tolmachoff was firm in his rejection of the story, saying "Howorth quite correctly considers it a fiction. ... Such an expedition never took place to this part of Siberia. The first steamer arrived to the Lena River only... in 1881."

It's possible that Tolmachoff's debunking wasn't entirely missed. The name Benekndorf has slowly faded out of scientific literature. Prothero and Schoch's lengthy quote is more of an exception than a rule. Körber's misinformation about mammoth diet has been harder to stamp out, because it gained a life of its own attached to Middendorff's authority but separated from its Benkendorf origin.

The Russian scientist B.A. Tikhomirov tried to deal with both the diet misinformation and the Benkendorf story in an article that was published in Russian in 1958 and in English in 1961. The title "The Expedition That Never Was -- Benkendorf's Expedition to the River Indigirka" should be all that most people need to see to get the point. Unfortunately, most people didn't see it. In the same year that the English version of Tikhomirov's article was printed, William Farrand published his article, "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology," which made reference to Benkendorf. Using Google Scholar, Google Book, and plain old Google, I can find well over two hundred references to Farrand's article and zero to Tikhomirov. I made no attempt to eliminate the duplicates in Farrand's results, but the imbalance is clear. Although Farrand's article is excellent and deserves the attention it has received, it is a perfect example of how difficult it has been to stamp out the myth of Benkendorf's mammoth.


Gratuitous mammoth, just because I thought we needed another illustration. This one is an early work by the Czech illustrator, Zdenek Burian.

That catastrophists and others have kept the Benkendorf story alive isn't surprising. Catastrophists, conspiracy buffs, and other forbidden knowledge writers not only endlessly recycle each other's material, when mainstream scientific literature does penetrate their sphere, it is usually decades out of date. Maybe someday they'll hear of Tikhomirov, until then, I'm the best thing the internet has to offer as a mammoth myth debunker. I fully expect every blogger I know to link to this post and raise it up in the Google ranks, Not because I'm begging for traffic, mind, you, but as a public service. You owe it to the kids. It's always the kids who suffer the most.

The internet has made the dissemination of bad information faster and easier than ever before, it did not invent the problem. Print media did just fine in spreading nonsense for the five thousand years and will continue to play its party for the foreseeable future. Long after mankind has eliminated itself from the globe and the world has been left to cockroaches and crabgrass, those cockroaches will talk about the Benkendorf mammoth.

Final word: The Benkendorf story might have left one good deed as part of its legacy. While hunting for examples of Benkendorf still in circulation, I found five separate sites offering the same term paper on the ice age with -- you guessed it -- prominent space given to the Benkendorf mammoth. For you teachers out there, the sites are: Promptpapers.com, Essaymania, Midtermpapers, Digital Essays, and Example Essays.com. The last site is my favorite because they also offer a really bad essay on the "Siberian" Scientist Nicola Tesla. ***

* At the time, there was a separate, related, dispute over whether or not mammoths had really lived in Siberia. Many naturalists thought that mammoths, as elephants, must have lived in a warmer climate. At the same time they felt Siberia must have always been as cold as it is today. Therefore, they concluded, the mammoth bones and cadavers found in Siberia must have come from somewhere else, probably far to the south, and that their remains were carried to Siberia by rivers or ocean currents. Someday I’ll write post on the controversy.

** Yes. At the time, they thought the mastodon might have been carnivorous. I wrote about the killer mastodon here.

*** I still seem to be having trouble with that "keep your posts under a thousand words" thing.

Bring back the mammoth
Stories about Japanese or Russian geneticists who think they might be able to bring back the woolly mammoth are becoming something of a staple of science journalism. Every couple of months we get a new story about it. Basically, there are only two stories. The first, is the scientist who hopes to recover intact mammoth DNA from a frozen mammoth to use in cloning experiments. So far no one has recovered any intact mammoth DNA. The second story is about a scientist who wants to recover sperm cells (with intact DNA) from a frozen mammoth to use in artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization. Both approaches then use an Indian elephant as a surrogate mother to carry the mammoth fetus to term. Today's story is one of the latter type.

Descendants of extinct mammals like the giant woolly mammoth might one day walk the Earth again.

It isn't exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives.

So far they've succeeded with mice--some frozen as long as 15 years--and lead researcher Dr. Atsuo Ogura says he would like to try experiments in larger animals.

"In this study, the rates of success with sperm from 15 year-frozen bodies were much higher than we expected. So the likelihood of mammoths revival would be higher than we expected before," Ogura said in an interview via e-mail.

There is a big difference between mouse testes stored fifteen years under laboratory conditions and mammoth testes left outside for fifteen thousand years.

Less enthusiastic was Dr. Peter Mazur, a biologist at the University of Tennessee who has worked with frozen eggs and sperm and is a past president of the Society for Cryobiology.

[...]

"The storage temperature of frozen mammoths is not nearly low enough to prevent the chemical degradation of their DNA over hundreds of thousands of years," he commented. And "even if the temperature were low enough to prevent chemical degradation, that would not prevent serious damage over those time periods from background radiation, which includes cosmic rays."

While Ogata and Mazur might be great biologists in their own fields, neither is much of a paleontologist. A spokesman for Ogata's team refers to frozen mammoths as millions of years old and Mazur refers to them as hundreds of thousands of years old. All of the frozen mammoths ever dated fall into an age range of fifty thousand to twelve thousand years old--an order of magnitude younger than Ogata and Mazur's references.

Both methods for bringing mammoths back face monstrous obstacles. While the cloning method is less discriminating in its source of DNA it depends on implanting ancient DNA from one species into another. Simple cloning with the best materials from the same species is still quite difficult. The mammoth plan adds additional levels of complexity with additional barriers to success. While artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization are methods with a far higher rate of success than cloning, the odds of finding mammoth sperm cells with intact DNA are much smaller than those of finding any old cell with intact DNA.

Assuming they do find intact DNA and accomplish fertilization, both methods need to get an Indian elephant to carry the baby mammoth (or mammoth hybrid) to term--another difficult task. Finally, if we can overcome all of these obstacles, the baby mammoth is going to be an orphan like no orphan has been--the only member of its species. There will be no adult mammoth available to teach it how to be a mammoth; it will have to learn to be an elephant. In time some uniquely mammoth behaviors might emerge. If we produce a whole herd, they might get more mammothy over the course of a couple of generations. Since we don't have any mammoth to compare them to, we wouldn't know if this was authentic mammoth behavior or if our orphans were inventing new behavior in response to the new environment in which we have placed them.

So many questions. So many problems. As much as I'd like to see a mammoth stomping around on a healthy mammoth steppe, it might be better if I held out for time travel to show me one.

The first great mammoth

In the far north, when the sun returns after its complete absence during the debt of winter, it is not yet spring. The temperature remains well below freezing for several months more. But as the days grow longer and the temperature creeps upward, the snow shrinks, first compacting and forming a hard crust, and finally it melts. The thaw, when it arrives, is not the same as the thaw in more temperate latitudes. In the far north, the melt water cannot soak into the ground, because the ground is permanently frozen. Instead, it flows across the surface hunting for a path to the sea. The same frozen ground that prevents the water from soaking in, prevents the rivers from carving deep channels. Instead, they are wide and when the melt water arrives they become wider still. A small river easily becomes a mile wide and a great river, like the Lena, becomes ten, twenty, or even more miles wide. Every year the river explodes onto the land, searching for new channels, tearing at hillsides, carrying away trees and millions of tons of earth. Sometimes the raging waters uncover treasures.

During the short summer that followed the floods, it was the habit of Ossip Shumachov and his brothers to search for ivory along the beaches of the Bykovski Peninsula. Shumachov (various spellings have been given for his name over the years) was a chief of the Batouline clan of the Evenki. Shumachov's people were better off than other Evenki (called Tungoos or Tungus by most Europeans at the time). The land they called home was productive enough that they lived in permanent cabins in a small village. They owned domesticated reindeer and traded with the Russian merchants who worked the Lena and the Arctic coast. In exchange for the knives and other metal tools the Russians brought, Shumachov's people trapped furs and hunted for ivory. However, looking for ivory was not something dependable that Shumachov and his brothers could dedicate a special time to. It was something they did along side their more important hunting, herding, and fishing.

In the summer of the year that the Russians called 1799, after the fish runs in the Lena had ended, Shumachov took his extended family to the Bykovski Penninsula to hunt wild reindeer. After building the teepee-like huts that served as temporary homes for his band, Shumachov went out to examine the coastal bluffs and see what windfalls the spring storms might have exposed. On the seaward side of a hill called Kembisagashaeta, near the top of the bluff, he noticed a dark mass just beginning to be exposed. He climbed and examined it, but couldn't tell what it was. With more important things to do during the short summer, he didn't spend any more time investigating the mass.


Evenki fishing camp on the Lena Delta, 1881. Shumachov's camp would have looked very much like this. The conical tents are constructed in a manner similar to teepees but with walls of birch bark instead of buffalo hide.
The next summer, when his family returned to the peninsula, Shumachov found a dead walrus on the beach below the mysterious mass. I'm not sure why Adams, the person who recorded Shumachov's story, thought the walrus was important enough to mention. It might be that, in stopping to look at the walrus, Shumachov was reminded of the mysterious mass on the hill and stopped to examine it again. Or the connection might through the subject of ivory. A dead walrus on the beach would be a smelly mess in no time, though a welcome buffet to seagulls, foxes, and polar bears. Shumachov's primary reason for investigating a dead walrus would have been checking to see if the thick skin was salvageable and if it had tusks that he could cut off and sell. Whatever his reason for stopping, Shumachov noted that enough of the mysterious mass had eroded out that he could see that it was made up of one large part and two smaller ones. He would later discover that these were the body and two feet of a mammoth.

By the third summer, enough of the side of the mammoth had been exposed for Shumachov to see one of the tusks. Returning to the camp, he told the others about his discovery. Shumachov expected the news to be cause for celebration; instead, the older members received it with expressions of sadness. The old men explained to him that several generations before, a hunter had discovered a mammoth carcass near the same spot. He and his whole family died soon after. Because of that, the people of the region viewed mammoth carcasses as portents of disaster. Shumachov became sick with worry and retired to his cabin to die. After a few weeks of not dying, he decided the old stories weren't true and returned to the bluff to hide his discovery.

The next year was colder than usual and the mammoth didn't thaw any further. Adams' account doesn't mention it, but it's possible that Shumachov's efforts at hiding his treasure might have insulated it from whatever warmth there was that year.

Finally, at the end of the fifth summer, 1803, the bluff had eroded and thawed enough for the mammoth to break free and tumble down onto the beach. The following March--still the debt of winter, but a time of little activity, waiting for the spring hunting and fishing season--Shumachov and two companions left their village and returned to the Bykovski Peninsula to collect the ivory treasure. The tusks were nine feet long and two hundred pounds each. That summer, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk sailed down the Lena and, when passing through Shumachov's village, bought the tusks. The price was fifty rubles worth of trade goods--roughly $975 today. For a people who lived almost completely outside of the money economy, this would have been a great boon to his village. When he heard that the ivory came from a complete mammoth, Boltunov was curious enough to go to the spot and make a drawing of how the animal must have looked in life. Shumachov had watched the mammoth slowly reveal itself and waited to collect the ivory for five years. Having done that he had no further use for the carcass; he left it to wild predators and fed some of it to his dogs. There is no evidence that Shumachov's people ate, or even tried to eat, any of the mammoth.

In the one hundred ten years since Evert Ysbrants Ides first reported the discovery of a mammoth carcass, only four more had been reported and none of them had been recovered or made available for European scientists to examine. Dozens more were probably discovered during that time, but never reported. Shumachov's mammoth would have shared the fate of all the others except for one of those fortunate coincidences of history that placed the right man in the right place at the right time. That man was Mikhail Adams, a naturalist from St. Petersburg (not from Scotland, as is sometimes reported).

Although only twenty-seven, Adams was already a veteran field biologist. Soon after the kingdom of Georgia was annexed to the Russian Empire, he traveled in the entourage of General Apollo Mussin-Pushkin to inspect the new frontiers and brought back several new species of flowers. In 1805, the Foreign ministry began planning a major diplomatic effort to increase trade with China. A naval mission, commanded by Count Adam Krusenstern, sailed around the world, aiming to open Chinese and Japanese ports to Russian trade. A second mission, under Count Yuri Golovkin, was to travel overland, hoping to open the entire Chinese border to Russian merchants (at the time, only one road was open to Russian merchants and it was subject to frequent closure by the Chinese). Both missions included scientific teams. Because of his success on the Georgian mission, Adams was the natural choice for a mission to the other end of the empire.

From diplomatic and commercial standards, both missions were complete disasters. The Golovkin mission, which had swollen to over three thousand members by the time it reached the Chinese border, camped in Mongolia for over three months arguing over protocol. In February 1806, the Chinese told the Russians to leave. The mission broke up in Siberia. While Golovkin and the diplomats returned to St. Petersburg to explain their failure to the emperor, the scientific team stayed in Siberia and split up, each to pursue their own research. One of Adams' colleagues, the linguist Julius Klaproth (son of the discoverer of uranium), collected information from Tibetan and Buryat Lamas about the origin of the word "mammoth" and what they believed about the beast.

Thanks to Golovin and the Chinese getting snitty with each other, Michael Adams found himself in Yakutsk at the beginning of the Siberian summer in 1807.

I was informed at Jakoutsk, by M. Popoff, who is at the head of the company of merchants of that town, that they had discovered, upon the shores of the Frozen-Sea, near the mouth of the river Lena, an animal of an extraordinary size: the flesh skin, and hair, were in good preservation, and it was supposed that the fossile production, known by the name of Mammoth-horns, must have belonged to some animal of this kind.

M. Popoff had, at the same time, the goodness to communicate the drawing and description of this animal; I thought proper to send both to the President of the Petersburgh Academy. The intelligence of this interesting discovery determined me to hasten my intended journey to the banks of the Lena, as far as the Frozen-Sea, and I was anxious to save these precious remains, which might, perhaps, otherwise be lost. My stay at Jakoutsk, therefore, only lasted a few days. I set out on the 7th of June, 1806...

It was well into August before Adams reached the mammoth carcass and he had to work quickly to gather the remains and get back to Yakutsk before the Siberian winter set in. His first sight of the mammoth was not encouraging. For the two years since Shumachov removed the tusks, the carcass had been at the mercy of local scavengers, most of the flesh and organs were gone along with the trunk, the tail, and one of the fore legs. Adams wrote that he could smell the rotting carcass from over a mile away. But further inspection showed it to be a scientific treasure.

Two of the feet were completely intact, with skin and flesh still covering the bones. One eyes and the brain had dried up, but were still in place and undamaged by predators. The eye was later destroyed when the skin was being dried. Most of the skeleton was there and many of the bones were still held together by ligaments and skin. This would make reassembling the skeleton a much easier task and add confidence that the reconstruction was correct. Even with a leg missing, this by far the most complete skeleton ever recovered.

The missing trunk was a disappointment, but not a problem. European naturalists had known that the mammoth was some kind of elephant since the middle of the previous century. The debate had been about what kind of elephant it was. But while Adams knew how an elephant should look and had no doubt that a trunk had once been there, the Siberians he encountered were a little more puzzled. The merchant Boltunov, who bought the tusks, viewed the carcass after the trunk had been carried off. He made a drawing based on what he thought the animal must have looked in life. This was the drawing that Popoff gave Adams in Yakutsk and that he sent on to St. Petersburg.

Boltunov viewed the mammoth after he bought the tusks from Shumachov. His reconstruction indicates that the scavengers had already carried off the trunk and that most of the fur had fallen off the skin. To him, the big blocky body looked like a giant boar. He placed the hair, in boar fashion, as a line of bristles running along its spine. The handlebar mustache placement of the tusks might be intended also to resemble the outward angle of a boar's tusks or it might be a wild fantasy on Boltunov's part.

While Boltunov was completely wrong about the tusks and snout, he bettered Adams on the tail. Adams, on finding the mammoth with no tail, determined that their had never been a tail. Boltunov, who saw the carcass over a year before Adams saw a short tail and included it in his drawing. Adams either did not look closely at Boltunov's drawing or, since the front half of the reconstruction was so wrong, dismissed the back half. When the skeleton was reassembled in St. Petersburg, the academy sided with Boltunov and added a tail, leaving only the exact length open to debate.


Roman Boltunov's drawing.
After the skeleton, the skin was the best preserved part of the mammoth. Adams reported that the skin was "of a deep grey, and covered with reddish hair and black bristles." The hair was over two feet in length. After separating the skin from the skeleton, Adams loaded both on sledges made of drift wood. The skin was "of such an extraordinary weight, that ten persons ... moved it with great difficulty."

After the skin was removed, Adams carefully gathered all the hair he could find, bagging up over forty pounds. Most of the hair had fallen off the skin before Adams arrived and nearly all of the rest fell off when the skin was dried for transport back to St. Petersburg. This left plenty of room for subsequent debate as to whether or not the mammoth was truly adapted to a cold climate.* Adams described the hair as a mane, which was taken to mean that the hair that remained attached to the skin when he arrived was mostly around the neck and shoulders. Boltunov's drawing, which was made a year before Adams arrived, does not show a mane. Either because it was not well distributed or because of the cartoon nature of the drawing, this difference was only noted by a few naturalists during the next century.

With everything packed up for shipping, Adams took a few days to explore the peninsula and make observations on the local geology and botany. The first step of the 11,000 verst (a verst is roughly equivalent to a kilometer) journey back to St. Petersburg, was to load the remains into a boat that would take them up the Lena River to Yakutsk. The boat hadn't arrived when Adams needed it, so he tied his sledges to reindeer and hauled everything down the coast until he located the boat. In Yakutsk, he acquired a set of tusks that he wrote were the very ones Shumachov had sold to Boltunov two years earlier. He added these to rest of his cargo and sent the whole load to capitol.

Word of Shumachov's discovery had leaked out after Adams notified the Academy that he was going to try to recover the mammoth. Copies of Boltunov's drawing were sent to several leading European naturalists, including Cuvier and Blumenbach. Boltunov's reconstruction of the mammoth as a giant boar, though not believed whetted their curiosity to know more. When the mammoth arrived in St. Petersburg, sections of the skin were cut off, packaged with some of the hair, and sent to important museums and collections in Western Europe. Surprisingly little was done with the skin and hair after its arrival in the capitol. Presumably, the naturalists at the academy eagerly examined it, but no detailed report was published.

Back in St. Petersburg, Adams wrote an account of his expedition. The Russian version of his account was published before the end of the year. French, German, and English translations were published the next year and eagerly poured over by scientists and educated laymen. That they got to see Adams' account so quickly demonstrates the different world that scientists inhabited in those days. In August 1806, while Adams was preparing to leave the Lena delta, the War of the Fourth Coalition broke out with France and its German allies on one side and Russia, Prussia and Britain on the other. While Napoleon defeated Russian armies and created a new Polish state, scientists in Paris and St. Petersburg exchanged papers and discussed science unbothered by things like war and politics. After Boltunov's drawing and Adams' expedition narrative, naturalists in Russia and abroad wanted to know the juicy anatomical details. For these they would have to wait longer.

The job of reassembling the mammoth was entrusted by the Imperial Academy of Sciences to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius. Tilesius, like Adams, had been part of Russia's ambitious, but unsuccessful, diplomatic efforts towards China. As the scientific artist for Krusenstern's naval expedition, Tilesius produced ethnographic drawings of Pacific Islanders as well as botanical and zoological drawings of specimens collected in Alaska and Siberia. He produced the first scientific description of the delicious king crab.

In June 1805, when his ship put into Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, Tilesius heard from the captain of the supply ship of a mammoth that the captain had seen. Capt. Patapof claimed to have "lately seen a Mammoth elephant dug up on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, clothed with a hairy skin." As evidence, he gave Tilesius the hair that he had collected from the animal. Tilesius met Patapof over a year after Shumachov harvested and sold the tusks from his mammoth. It's possible that the mammoths are one in the same or the mammoth could be one that Shumachov said had been seen two years before he found his. Scientists have made that speculation for the last two hundred years, but had no way to prove theory. Patapof vanished from history after his conversation with Tilesius and didn't give a more specific location than "on the shores of the Frozen Ocean." If the hairs that Patapof gave to Tilesius could be located and positively identified, it would now be possible to tease enough DNA out of them to finally answer that question**.

Reassembling the mammoth was not an especially difficult task for Tilesius. Craftsmen at the Kunstkamera, the museum established by Peter the Great, made wooden replacements for the missing bones and repaired those that were broken. Tilesius knew that the reconstructed skeleton needed to resemble an elephant's skeleton. As early as 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne had argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant. In 1799, the same year the Shumachov first noticed the mammoth eroding out of the cliffs on the Bykovski Penninsula, Georges Cuvier had published a paper in Paris that proved the mammoth to be a different, and extinct, type of elephant. In that same year, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach provided a formal Latin name for the mammoth--Elphas primigenius. Not everyone accepted the conclusion that mammoths were extinct (Thomas Jefferson was one), but no one doubted the basic elephantness of mammoths. With that information in mind, Tilesius was able to refer to the skeleton of an Indian elephant already in the museum***.

The one detail that stumped Tilesius was the placement of the tusks. No one had yet recovered a mammoth skull with the tusks still attached; the proper placement of them was a mystery. Naturalists who had had the opportunity to examine intact mammoth tusks had all commented on the fact that the curve of them was completely different than that of African or Indian elephants. Mammoth tusks are larger and more curved. The tusks of an old, adult, male mammoth can have a curve of almost three-quarters of a circle. They also curve widely out and then back in. The combined effect is gives the tusks an almost corkscrew shape. Mammoth tusks are much larger than those of an Indian elephant of the same age.

The tusks that Adams sent back were not the ones that Shumachov had cut off and sold two years earlier. There is no reason to believe that Adams intentionally set out to deceive Tilesius and the rest of the world. It's more likely that was sold a pair of tusks that he desperately wanted to believe were the right ones. The tusks Adams sent to St. Petersburg were from a younger, and therefore smaller, mammoth.

Tilesius had to guess at the correct placement and guessed wrong. An adult mammoth's tusks curved down, out, up, and back in with tips facing inward. This made them useless as defensive or offensive weapons. At the time, naturalists believed the sole purpose of an elephant's tusks was to be weapons. Many naturalists used the word "defense" rather than "tusk" to describe them. With that in mind, Tilesius mounted the tusks on the wrong sides so that they curved out and back like giant ivory scythes. His mistake wouldn't be corrected until 1899 and scientists would still argue about proper tusk placement well into the twentieth century.

At the time, attempting to reconstruct an unknown animal from its bones was a new and bold idea. The first reconstruction had been done only eighteen years earlier by Juan Bautista Bru of the Royal Museum in Madrid. In 1789, the museum received the bones of an huge, unknown animal that had been dug up near Buenos Aires. With no living animal to compare it to, Bru reassembled the bones and prepared a set of drawings of the complete skeleton and various details. His reconstruction gives the animal no tail or sternum. Bru chose to mount only the bones he had and not to speculate about the missing bones. Bru never published. In 1796, Georges Cuvier acquired a set of Bru's drawings and decided that the animal was a ground sloth bigger than an elephant. He named it Megatherium americanum (big American beast).

In 1801, Charles Willson Peale oversaw the excavation of a mastodon in the Hudson River Valley. He took the bones to his museum in Philadelphia and reassembled them. Peale's reconstruction was intended as a commercial project as well as a scientific one. In order to give the patrons of his museum the best possible monster (he describe the mastodon as an immense, carnivorous mammoth), Peale's son, Rembrandt, carved wooden replacements for missing bones. The only part that they did not feel confident about producing a replacement for was the top of the skull.


Peale's mastodon. Tilesius wasn't alone in his confusion over tusk placement.
Tilesius worked methodically and slowly; it took him five years to complete his study of the skeleton. He presented his findings to the Academy in 1812 and it took another three years for the Academy to publish them. That little business of Napoleon invading the country and burning Moscow to the ground might have had something to do with the delay. In the mean time, to satisfy the demand for information, Tilesius prepared two large etchings of the reassembled skeleton with details of the skull, jaw, and femur. He sent these, along updates on his work, to his colleagues in the West. Tilesius' main etching of the complete mammoth was copied and republished for most of the century.


Tilesius' etching of his reconstruction. He left the skin on the head and on the feet. From this profile view, the incorrect placement of the tusks isn't as obvious as it would have been viewed from any other angle. The letters refer to descriptions of the individual bones in his detailed report.
An important side effect of having so many anatomical questions answered, was that much of the debate moved to attempting to understand the environment in which the mammoths lived and explaining their preservation. The idea of ice ages was still thirty years in the future when Adams brought his mammoth west. Many, if not most, naturalists couldn't believe that climate in the past could have been that much different that in their present. Permafrost was a complete mystery and many didn't even believe it was real; it had to be an erroneous observation made by ignorant Siberians.

Adams' account was not much more than a short travel narrative. Though interesting in its own right, the actual description of the mammoth and the conditions of its preservation lacked details. Adams' real scientific talent was as a botanist and those skills were of limited use in salvaging a dead mammoth. He couldn't press the mammoth between the pages of a book and drop it into his luggage. Even if he could have, it would have taken a much larger book and traveling bag than anything he had with him. What frustrated later naturalists was that Adams' skills should have made him a better observer than he was. He made no drawings of the mammoth as he found it and none of the location. When Karl von Baer joined the Academy in 1834, he sought out members who had known Adams and been present during the restoration of the skeleton, "but they had heard nothing more special and only said that Adams had embellished his report."

Adams should be forgiven his weakness as a paleontologist and geologist. When he heard about the discovery, he recognized its importance and rushed to recover what he could. Had another year passed, it's likely that there would not have been enough of the mammoth left to add anything to what the European naturalists already knew. Adams also paid far more attention to the people who actually found the mammoth than most naturalists of the time would have. Adams told the story of the actual discovery in Shumachov's voice. He also included some details of the life of the Evenki, though these were strongly colored by a noble savage / happy children of nature ideology. The Siberians did not remember Adams as fondly as he remembered them.

In February 1869, Gerhard von Maydell was in the second year of an expedition to Northeastern Siberia on behalf of the Russian Geographic Society. While wintering in Nizhne-Kolymsk, well above the Arctic Circle, he received a message from Magistrate Ivaschenko of Vekhoyansk (the coldest place in the northern hemisphere), that some hunters had found a mammoth cadaver not far from Nizhne-Kolymsk. Ivaschenko's message gave a detailed description of the location and named the hunters. As soon as the weather permitted, Maydell headed for the location and located the hunters. Their leader, named Foca, denied knowing anything about mammoths. Maydell pressed him and Foca claimed he hadn't seen the mammoth himself and couldn't help Maydell find it. Maydell had to quote Ivaschenko's message to "prove" to Foca that he had seen the mammoth. Faced with proof, and forty pounds of tobacco, Foca finally relented and agreed to take Maydell to the spot.

At the time, the Imperial government was offering a bounty of up to three hundred rubles, supplies, and even a medal to anyone who reported the remains of a mammoth. In 1929, V.I. Tolmachoff wrote, that to his knowledge, between the time Peter the Great first offered a bounty and the Revolution, despite the bounty increasing to one thousand rubles in 1914, only one person ever claimed the bounty. Maydell explained Foca's reluctance this way: "the natives of the area have such a bad memory of Adams's expedition that, where possible, they conceal their discoveries because they are afraid of being forced to work and provide haulage." Pause for a moment and consider that almost three generations had passed since Adams had collected a mammoth five hundred miles from where Maydell was trying to find another, but the memory of his visit had spread that far.

Foca's reluctance was not unique. In 1882 Alexander Bunge landed on Moustakh Island to set up a weather station as part of a grand series of expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the Arctic. Moustakh lies a few miles southeast of the Bykovsky peninsula where Shumachov found his mammoth. Seeing that the Russians were on the island to stay, the local headman reluctantly showed Bunge the remains of a frozen mammoth that had been found twenty-five years earlier. The locals sold the ivory to a trader who told the district magistrate about the mammoth. When he came to investigate, the locals told him that they had chopped the mammoth up and thrown it into the sea.

The casual exploitation of native labor is an ugly subtext to most scientific advances on the imperial frontiers. Even when the laborers who dig up the temples and carry the specimens to coast were paid, we should ask whether they had a choice in that transaction. Adams described Shumachov's village as having 40-50 people, all engaged in putting up food for winter. He then mentions taking "ten Toungouses" with him to excavate the mammoth. If they all came from the village, that would mean he took almost the entire population of able-bodied adult males with him and kept them from hunting during the time of year that was most essential to their survival. This is the reality that lies beneath Adams' flattering narrative.

Perhaps it is reading too much into the event to notice that none of the later scientists and explorers who passed through the region mention being able to interview anyone who knew Adams. It is thanks to Adams that we even know the name Ossip Shumachov, but Shumachov and his people vanish from the historical record after Adams left with his treasure. Again, perhaps that's reading too much into the story. Sacajewea also vanished after her brief moment in the historical limelight. Shumachov's people could not have been destroyed by Adams' visit or there would not have been anyone to tell their neighbors to hide their mammoths.

At a distance of thirty years, Karl Baer could find out very little about Michael Adams. At a distance of two hundred years, there is even less for me to find out. As imperialist exploiters go, Adams was more sensitive than most, but still within the bell curve. As scientists go, he was good enough to recognize the importance of a find outside his specialty, but in over his head when it came to dealing with that discovery. Ultimately, this isn't a story about Adams; it's about the mammoth.


A fanciful, and largely incorrect, illustration of Adams' first view of the mammoth printed in the 1890s.
The Adams mammoth was unquestionably the most important mammoth discovery of the nineteenth century. There wouldn't be another find of this magnitude, until the discovery of the Berezovka mammoth in 1901. That doesn't mean mammoth studies sat still for a century. The Adams mammoth, and especially Tilesius' study, framed the discussion, but didn't end debate. For the rest of the century, paleontologists tried to build on Adams' and Tilesius' work and, sometimes, to argue against their conclusions. A great deal of attention was turned to attempting to understand the world in which the mammoths had lived and how the frozen corpses had come to be in that condition.

Adams and Tilesius were not the last people to study the mammoth. as other mammoths were discovered, conservators at the museum have made minor changes to skeleton. They have modified the line of the vertebrae to show the now familiar high shoulders and sloping back profile. They have remounted the tusks on the correct sides and replaced them with tusks of the appropriate size. They have carbon dated the mammoth to 35,800 14C YBP. They have teased DNA out of his hair. They have located the place where Shumachov found him and, for reasons unrelated to the mammoth, that bluff has become one of the most closely studied bits of permafrost on the planet. Does the Adams mammoth still have secrets to tell us? I like to think so.


The Adams mammoth remains on display in the The Museum of Zoology in St. Petersburg, as it has for almost two centuries. Millions of visitors have probably seen it during that time.

* One piece of skin that could have gone a long way towards settling the question ended up in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. This piece, one of the few that still had the hair attached, clearly showed the hair as being in the form of a thick, woolly undercoat with long guard hairs. While furry and woolly animals exist in all climates, this particular two layer arrangement is most common in cold adapted animals.

** Although police forensics shows on television regularly state that it is only possible to get DNA a skin tab attached to hair and not from the hair shaft itself, this is no longer true. A 2007 experiment successfully extracted DNA from the hair of mammoths, including the Adams mammoth. Obviously, the most important application of this technology will be to prove the guilt or innocence of mammoths accused of heinous crimes.

*** This elephant had been a gift to Peter the Great from the Shah of Persia in 1713. Peter built a special heated house for the elephant, but the climate of St. Petersburg was still more than it could handle.