The mammoth that never was

In the three-hundred-fifty 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 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 of those theories, 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 despite the fact that the believers date them thousands of years apart.

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 1806, Mikhail 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. I have given an entire chapter to this mammoth in my book. 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 muscles 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 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.

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. 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. Second, 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.

Kosmos für die Jugend. Mammoths weren't the only prehistoric animals on Körber's book.

In Körber's book, Benkendorf is an exemplary character, the son of a Baltic German schoolteacher, who dedicated himself to studying the mathematical arts. While serving in the Russian army, he came to the attention of his superiors who recommended him to the navy where, at the age of twenty-five, he was attached to a surveying expedition along the Siberian coast. Körber lets the young lieutenant tell the story in his own words, supposedly as a letter to a relative in Germany who passed it on to the author.

After a credible description of permafrost, a still unnamed and mysterious phenomenon, he describes the setting. The year of his expedition, 1846, had an unusually warm and early spring. Unseasonable rains melted away the snow and cleared the rivers while tearing away river banks and flooding the land. When the rains stopped, they could see that the Indigirka River was free of ice. He was given charge of a steam launch and sent to explore the new channels carved by the floods. "There it was," he writes," we made a strange discovery."

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. 

Körber's illustration of the Benkendorf mammoth. I haven't seen this illustration published anywhere except for Körber's book.

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 river bottom 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 and republished in several languages over a decade. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius reassembled the skeleton and published a detailed description of it along with large illustrations. Adams' and Tilesius' papers were the basis for all mammoth studies in the nineteenth century. Körber's description of Benkendorf's mammoth stuck closely to their 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 which the merchant claimed were the originals from his skeleton. These tusks were, in fact, from a younger, smaller mammoth. 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.

Tilesius' incorrect tusk placement confirmed by Körber.

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 pure speculation and that turned out to be incorrect. 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, specifically like an African elephant, but badly suited to the Arctic. 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.

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 persisted almost 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 that question had great implications for understanding the nature of the mammoth, the nature of the ice ages (still a new idea), 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. Ten years before Körber's book came out, Brandt had published an extensive review of woolly rhino remains in the Russian imperial collection and previous studies on them. Brandt had examined the head of the first frozen woolly rhino discovered and observed: 

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 is very likely that Körber was aware of Brandt's work. Brandt's first observations were published as a letter in the journal of the Royal Prussian Academy in 1846 in German, Körber's native language. His complete paper was published in the journal of the Russian academy. It was also reported in one of the most influential geology books of the century, Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, from the 1853 edition forward.

Besides Brandt, 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 forwarded 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. This is an important distinction. Although elephants can eat almost any plant matter, their teeth and guts are specialized as grazers—eaters of grasses and ground plants--not browsers--eaters of branches and leaves—like mastodons and woolly rhinos. This is a huge distinction in defining what mammoths were and what their environment was.

Because the Benkendorf story had so much prestige by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was almost unchallengeable. When the final analysis of the gut material recovered by Herz was published in 1914, the author of the study, V. N. Sukachev, even before describing the grasses and flowering herbs in its gut, almost apologetically wrote that his conclusions gave "no particular reasons for distrusting Benkendorf's testimony." The two diets continued side by side almost to the end of the twentieth century 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.

Alexander von Middendorff spent his entire life documenting everything he knew about Siberia. Was he too complete?

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 and almost died getting back. 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 report appeared in 1867. Along with the details of his own find, Middendorff included an historical survey of previous finds which included the entire Benkendorf letter. This is the ultimate source of the transition of Körber's tale from the realm of educational fiction into the realm of fact.

It appears to me that Körber's tale came to Middendoff's attention because of 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 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; Benkendorf 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 frigate with two steam cutters could have been rounded the peninsula 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 fantasy 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 implies that he thought that the Benkendorf letter, as published, was a generously embellished account of a real discovery though he, of all people, was in a position to have known better. 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.

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.

William Boyd Dawkins.

In 1868, within a few months of Middendorff's monograph on mammoths 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.

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 further efforts 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 British geological 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].

 Perhaps the most important, and thus 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 up to that date. His count of thirty-nine is still sometimes repeated, as is his map of their locations. My research brings the count up to about seventy-five after deducting the four rhinoceroses in his original count. Tolmachoff tells the story in detail, but is firm in his rejection of it, 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." As often as Tolmachoff has been read and cited, no one seems to have read beyond his first telling of the story to catch is rejection of it.

The Russian scientist B.A. Tikhomirov tried to deal with both the diet of 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. He was partly motivated by guilt. He had cited the Benkendorf letter in an earlier paper and later discovered his error by reading a paper by Brandt on the history of mammoth discoveries to 1866 with an unqualified rejection of the story. Following this revelation, Tikhomirov went to the naval archives to confirm that Benkendorf's expedition never happened. That there is no permission or budget recorded for it should have provided the most definitive debunking possible for anyone familiar with the Russian bureaucracy of the time (or an any bureaucracy of any country, for that matter).

Tikhomirov's paper arrived at what should have been a great time to influence catastrophist narratives and their use of the frozen mammoth. The fifties had begun to produce a bumper crop of catastrophists citing frozen mammoths as proof of their theories. The greatest of these was Immanuel Velikovsky, whose pinballing planets theory jammed all post ice age history together into a couple thousand years in order to prove the Old Testament. Charles Hapgood wanted the earth's crust to periodically, abruptly change location with relation to the poles. Otto Muck though he could explain the end of Atlantis by the strike of giant comet. The role of mammoths in these ideas was that they should have lived in temperate forests, as Benkendorf's diet indicated, and then been thrust into the Arctic and frozen according to their preferred catastrophe.

But, the year before Tikhomirov's paper appeared in a scientific journal, a much more sensationalist article appeared in the American popular press. Ivan T. Sanderson was a popular nature writer whose father had been killed by an angry rhinoceros (a detail that has nothing to do with this story). During the fifties, his focus gradually moved from topics like a nice book on elephants to serious endorsement of abominable snowmen. In 1960, he wrote an article that influences catastrophist narratives about mammoths to this day: “Riddle of the Frozen Mammoths.”

I'll leave Benkendorf here. In my next post. I want to say a few words about Sanderson's article and one of his most infamous sources.

This Is Going to Be So Fun

This week the book was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. The reviewer (Richard Conniff) takes a while to get to the book, preferring to start with wondering who I am.

 Discovering the Mammoth is one of those books that make you wonder about the author as much as about his topic. John J. McKay writes that he got started with a single blog post aiming to establish "a chronology of what was known about mammoths and when." Or rather, he got started because he noticed, while indulging his "great love of conspiracy theories and fringe ideas," that "lost history theories"—think Atlantis, flood geology and rogue planets—" all used frozen mammoths as proof positive of their ideas."

 I've written about this before.

One of the most popular contemporary catastrophist writers, Graham Hancock, has just issued a call to his readers to help him on a new project. He wants to know if anyone knows anything about mammoth discoveries, specifically if they know anything about Alaska. Hmmm.

Do I know anything about mammoth discoveries? Yes.

Am I familiar with catastrophist literature? Yes.

Am I familiar with recent geological literature on the soils in which late Pleistocene bones are found? Yes.

And other relevant scientific literature? Yes.

Do I know anything about Alaska? Yes.

So, here's a question, should I invite Mr. Hancock to Alaska so I can give him a tour of the places where mammoths are found and introduce him to the experts? It would have to be on his dime, of course, and I would reserve the rights to document the trip.

In any case, I plan to write about t his a lot.

The book is out

As of Tuesday, my book is officially out. Rush to your local bookseller and demand they sell you a copy. Get your friends and family to buy one. Badger your local library to acquire multiple copies. Donate one to your high school. Nag the school board to design a course based on it. I'm available for interviews. I'm available for signings. I'm available for lunch (if you're paying). Let's sell this thing.

This is a huge milestone in my life. Actually, several milestones in several aspects of my life, but let me stick to the most obvious. This is a major punctuation point in that project. I came up with the idea, sold it to an agent, who sold it to a publisher, who helped me edit the final copy, which was printed, and officially came out Tuesday. Preordered copies were shipped and my friends have been reporting receiving them all week. Technically, the project isn't over. I need to help sell it; do interviews, readings, and signings; and possibly write some more related mammoth materials.

This milestone is also a call to start a new project. I've written before how the book grew out of the idea for a single blog post, that became a series of blog posts, to a short book, to a dissertation. The two things I want to write now are the book I've wanted to write for thirty-five years--my history of the aftermath of WWI--and the other is another blog post gone out of control--my interpretation of the psychology and history of American political partisanship. Both have contemporary relevance.

The WWI book is coming up against marketable centennials. This will be an easier book to write. I've not only been thinking about it for over half of my life, it's the field of history that I specialized in during grad school. I own over a hundred books relevant to the topic. Unfortunately, the books are all in storage in Washington while I'm stuck in Alaska.

The book on recent partisanship in American politics, is something I've started over and over again as a blog post. I always get stuck at the point where I want to start citing sources. This is where my mammoth book got out of control. Tracking down things I've read over the last twenty years, just for a long-read blog-post that fewer than fifty people will finish was too discouraging to contemplate. It would make a great magazine piece, but I doubt my mammoth book alone is enough credentials sell the idea.

I'm also tempted to drag out some of my other abandoned, long blog-posts and try out publishing an e-book just for the experience. Unfortunately, many of those posts are on a hard-drive, stored with my books over a thousand miles away.

Decisions. Decisions.

PS -- Buy my book.

PPS -- I suppose this means I should go back to talking about politics and things unrelated to the book.

And yet another

Oh look, here's another review. Barnes & Nobel has this one on their page for the book.

Library Journal

When people first encountered the extinct mammoth remains, opinions varied on what these creatures were. In a thorough look at the beginning of paleontology, especially cultural influence and assumptions, technical writer McKay traces how people interpreted this mystery. The author organized centuries of sometimes messy findings into a coherent report spanning continents. History enthusiasts will appreciate learning how the mammoth and other discoveries were documented or lost. Shipwrecks, fire, and improper preservation destroyed evidence; inaccuracies in maps, sketches, and written descriptions impeded comprehension. Readers will find it humbling that the greatest minds of past centuries were adamantly wrong and will enjoy reading about their rationales: of course, it made sense to believe that mammoths lived underground and couldn't survive upon reaching the earth's surface. Similarly, those who held to a literal interpretation of the Bible assumed that the mammoth skulls belonged to giants who once roamed the land (the concept of a defunct species would have implied a flaw in God's design, a heretical thought).

VERDICT For those seeking a scholarly, straightforward examination of paleontology's origins and key players. 

—Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL

Damn, this is fun.

Another review

Today, I have a review on Booklist Online. It will also go out in their weekly news letter. It's recommended both for adults and teens. Since it's behind a subscription wall, I'll quote the whole thing here:

Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science. McKay, John J. (Author) Aug 2017. 256 p. Pegasus, hardcover, $27.95. (9781681774244). 569.6. 

Humans and mammoths coexisted until 10,000 years ago, but in the intervening years, humans lost that knowledge, even though they continued to find mammoth bones and trade in their ivory. In the seventeenth century, the recovery of teeth and bones of giant land mammals validated, for some, the existence of the mythical creatures described in the Christian Bible and local folklore until a modern elephant skeleton was first seen in Europe, and observational connections were made. But how could elephants, hot-weather animals, have gotten to North America and Europe? The great deluge described in the Bible was one explanation. Giant bones from a similar time frame were found in North America. Russian expeditions to map routes to Asia led explorers through some of the most fertile areas for mammoth ivory and bones. A nearly complete mammoth found in Siberian glacial ice helped to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and place this extinct species in the animal kingdom. McKay masterfully weaves an intricate story of the events, politics, people, and scientific development associated with the “rediscovery” of mammoths. — Dan Kaplan

Heh. "Masterfully."

Book update

The book has been printed. The printer started shipping to wholesalers last week. It should finally work it's way into your local bookstore the first week in August.

Meanwhile, the British science journal, Nature, is planning to review it and the Christian Science Monitor will be interviewing me for their review page.

We have a review!

Publisher's Weekly, the trade journal of the publishing industry, chose the Discovering the Mammoth to be reviewed this week. They can only review a fraction of the new books each week, so I think this is a good sign.

Book update

Last night, at around midnight, I finished the last revisions on my book and shipped it off to publisher. My editor will be taking it to the London Book Fair next month. She also told me Nature has requested a review copy.

The ugly mammoth

Toward the end of the last ice age, there were three(ish) types of mammoths in the world. Last week, in California, paleontologists excavated a skull that doesn't match any of the known three.

The Dig. Source.

The first of the major mammoth types is Mammuthus columbi, the Columbian mammoth. The Columbian was one of the biggest proboscideans that ever lived (putting it in the top ten largest land mammals). Mammoths are closer related to Asian elephants than they are to African elephants. They split off when all three genera lived in Africa. Asian elephants moved northeast through Arabia into Southern Asia, while mammoths looped through Europe into Central Eurasia and eventually reached Japan and the Siberian Pacific coast about three million years ago.

Who were these mammoths? The first mammoths in Africa were medium sized and probably resembled modern Asian elephants. As the mammoths moved out Africa they became larger and, we assume, better adapted to a cooler climate. The mammoths that arrived on the Pacific were quite large and somewhat hairy, but not woolly. They were adapted to the winters of inner Eurasia, but those winters were not that cold yet. The ice ages were just beginning. As these Eurasian mammoths changed and adapted, we define different stages of their evolution as distinct species even though there are no dramatic breaks along the way. The number and names of these progressive species are debatable.* I'm going to call the one that arrived at the eastern edge of Eurasia, Mammuthus trogontherii, the steppe mammoth.

At the right time, 1.5 or so million years ago, the steppe mammoths were able to walk straight into Alaska. In its coldest phases, the ice age locked up enough water in land-based icecaps to lower the oceans over 400 feet (130m). This dried up the Chukchi Sea and the northern half of the Bering Sea. Beringia, the "land bridge" connecting Alaska and Siberia, wasn't a narrow isthmus; it was wider than Alaska. Most of that lost water sat on Canada in a layer of ice two miles, or more, thick, blocking the way further into the continent. Due to a trick of the weather patterns, western Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, and Beringia were dry at that time except for some mountain glaciers. When the ice caps melted, the water flooded Beringia, stranding some steppe mammoth herds in North America while opening the whole continent to them. Once enough ice had melted off Canada to make traveling easy, they found tasty prairie grass all the way south to Florida and Mexico. Although the steppe mammoth didn't change much after arriving in America, I'm going to call it the Columbian mammoth from here on.

Beringia. Source.

The ice age was not a singular event. It's a convergence of geologic conditions that make it possible for great continental ice sheets to form. Once those preconditions are in place, other factors, mostly astronomical, push the climate over the edge into a glacial period. We are still living in ice age preconditions and are about six thousand years beyond what should have been the peak warm centuries of this cycle. Things should be very slowly cooling, not rapidly warming, but we kind of screwed that up. We're not sure yet how many glacial advances there have been. Once the idea of an ice age was accepted, European geologists began mapping where the front edge of the ice had been. In places, they found a second, older front edge further out, then a third, then a forth. The idea that there had been four glacial advances, about 100,000 years apart, held for most of a century but, after WWII, we started sailing around the world, drilling holes in things, counting layers, and teasing apart isotope ratios. It turns out there have been eight big 100,000 year cycles. And before that, there were milder 41,000 year cycles. A lot of them.

The steppe mammoths passed through Beringia during one of the small cycles approximately 1.5 million years ago. The long cycles began 740,000 years, ago leaving 15-20 cycles for Columbian and steppe mammoths to periodically connect in Beringia before then.** What happened next? Each cold cycle was colder than the previous one. Columbian mammoths lived on a prairie that extended north-south. When the ice sheets grew in Canada, they could move south to a zone that better suited them. Dealing with the cold phases was harder for the steppe mammoths back in Eurasia. Their prairie extended east-west inland. Moving away from Beringia into Asia, the climate got worse, not better for them. They needed to evolve to survive.

By the time the long, deep ice age cycles began, the steppe mammoths closest to Beringia had accumulated enough useful mutations that we can call them a new species. These mammoths not only had long, thick hair, they had two layers of shedable wool under it. Their bodies had taken on a shorter, more compact form. Their blood hemoglobin found a way to more efficiently bond with oxygen at low temperatures. All of their extremities had modifications to resist cold. We call them Mammuthus primigenius, the woolly mammoth (you probably guessed that). In a short period, woolly mammoths expanded westward and replaced the last steppe mammoths all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Eastward, they were able to colonize Beringia, after which they ran into ice-covered Canada.

During a later interglacial, when the path through Canada opened and the Bering Strait returned, woolly mammoths expanded southward. Unlike in Europe, they did not replace their cousins oon North America. Woolly mammoths co-evolved with a mosaic of clumping grasses and flowering herbs to form a distinct environment called the mammoth steppe. This environment was distinct from the prairie the Columbian mammoths' preferred and the Arctic tundra that currently covers much of the woolly mammoths' old territory. Although the two species mixed along the boundary of their preferred grazing lands, neither penetrated very deeply into the other's turf.***

The third mammoth was both a type and a species. Let me explain. The action around the Bering Strait/Land Bridge happened all over the world. When the seas went down, new lands were created or made easily accessible. Humans took advantage low water to colonize Australia and North America. In Europe, mammoths and straight-tusked elephants took advantage of narrow straits to colonize big islands in the Mediterranean. In California, a group of Columbian mammoths swam out to, Santarosae Island, an island  that was created when low water joined the northern Channel Islands into one mass. Where the islands were large enough, these intrepid mammoth (and S-T elephant) explorers established permanent populations. Then something interesting happened. They shrank. It's called the island effect. If there are no major carnivores, birds tend to become big, fat, and flightless. Other small animals also become large. Big herbivores, however, become smaller. Huge size, which was once useful for resisting predators, is a liability in a place with a limited food supply. The mammoth that only needs a third or an eighth the fodder of a mainland mammoth is the one who will survive a drought on an island. At the last glacial maximum, there were at least six species of pygmy elephants living around the world who came from at least three different ancestral lines (Tori Herridge has a book on them coming out next year).

Mainland and Island Mammoths. Source.

The Channel Islands pygmy mammoths, Mammuthus exilis, appeared and shrank sometime before the second to last glacial maximum. They survived the last warm period, even though the island shrank, broke into four parts, and then rejoined into one. The colonization of the island was not quite a one time thing. Santarosae Island was only about four miles from the mainland when the sea level was lowest. Elephants are excellent swimmers; twenty miles is not a problem for a planned swim. Over the entire time pygmy mammoths inhabited the Channel Islands, full sized Columbian mammoths continued to appear on the islands. One tenth of the mammoth bones found on the islands are Columbians.

Santarosae Island. Source.

The skull in question is not the most recent mammoth found on the island. This one is about 13,000 years old. The youngest is about 11,000 years old and within the margin of error of the first appearance of humans on the island. There's no indication of human contact wit this fossil and, if there was, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. We have evidence of direct contact (hunting) in New Mexico, Washington, and Siberia at earlier dates than this. What makes this interesting is the skull itself. It doesn't look like any of the other three mammoth species, and it's also not a mastodon.

Dwarfed mammoths/elephants are not perfect miniatures of their ancestors; they make adjustments to their specific environments because that's how evolution works. The proportions of the leg bones of the Channel Islands mammoths changed to better climb the steep hills on the island[s]. In common with other island dwarf elephants, their tusks shrank much more than their bodies. Large tusks are a big energy drain. The whole point of dwarfing is to conserve energy.

The Santarosae Skull. Source.

The new discovery is interesting because it doesn't neatly fit into any of our existing mammoth categories. It's bigger than a typical Island mammoth, but smaller than a mainland Columbian. Since this is near the end of the reign of the mammoths, it's not a partially dwarfed mammoth. Is it a young Columbian that swam out to the island? Probably, but here's what makes it intriguing. It has two well developed tusks, which are very asymmetrical. The left tusk curves down and forward in a gentle arc like a young Columbian or woolly mammoth. The right tusk curves down, out, back up, and inward like a very mature Columbian or woolly mammoth. One tusk is probably pathological, misshapen due to an injury or disease when it was younger. But, which one. So far, they have only the skull. With it out, they'll begin excavating beneath and around the site hunting for other bones. These will help answer exactly what the skull is. Is it merely a deformed individual or is it evidence of something new--not an asymmetrical mammoth, but perhaps an unknown disease.

Like all discovery stories, this one trails off while we wait for more details. Maybe, in a few months, after more of the skeleton has been excavated and the skull cleaned and examined, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History will issue a press release telling us about their progress, and the science press will deem it interesting enough to tell us about it. If not, we'll wait a couple years until one of the investigators publishes a scientific paper on it.

Meanwhile, we have only the mammoth. It would be great if this mammoth told us something amazing and universal about mammoths, evolution, extinction, human impact on the environment, or how climate change happens. It probably will not. It probably will only tell us about this mammoth. And that's great. Every living thing is an individual with its own life story and its own death story. Sue the T-rex is covered with scars that ripped into her very bones showing battles and injuries that she survived. Most of the famous frozen mammoths died horrible deaths by drowning or burial alive. My favorite, however, died a natural death on a spring day. He simply wore out and fell to the ground. He had a belly full of willow twigs, which is not typical mammoth fodder. But willow is a natural source of aspirin. The old mammoth had several arthritic vertebrae and was self-medicating. I suspect what's going to be most interesting about this mammoth is going to be its personal life history. What happened to its tusks? Why did it swim out from the mainland? Is there some datable event on the mainland, like a fire, that we can tie to its voyage? As a young mammoth on an island, younger and bigger than most of the others, what killed it? Do humans fit into this story somehow?

We know more about mammoths than any prehistorically extinct animal. By far. We have recovered scores of complete mammoth skeletons illustrating a large stretch of their evolution. We have recovered soft tissues of over forty individuals. We have DNA from over 100. We have stomach and gut contents of over a dozen. We have human illustrations of them in life. The next step is life histories of individual mammoths. This is how one ugly mammoth can be immortalized. It probably did not have an easy life and it died young. Let's not lose it in the back room of a museum and forget it. Let's take a good look at it and remember it. Even if it was an evil mammoth fleeing mammoth justice, its story deserves to be told. I want to hear it.


* Taxonimists are divided into two camps, spliters and lumpers. The former create new species based on any perceived difference in fossils (or living populations). The latter follow them around grumpily sweeping their profuse numbers of species back into a manageable number of piles. By 1940, the authoritative work on elephant taxonomy, Henry Fairfield Osborn's Proboscidea, identified 362 species in 44 genera including sixteen species of mammoths in North America alone. Today, about 175 species of probiscideans are recognized and that includes all the new species discovered since Osborn's time.

** As far as I can tell, no one has calculated a timeline of when the Strait was open and when it was closed. Geology in Alaska is years, even decades, behind the rest of the country. It's a big, empty place; difficult to get to; and plagued by hostile climate extremes, irritable bears, and armed libertarians. For many questions, gathering data is tricky and dangerous. But for others, the oil companies have collected great data, but it remains un-analysed and un-published. My question of when the Bering Strait was open or closed is a perfect example. While hunting for an answer, I came across scientific paper after paper with maps of drilling projects in the Chukchi and Bering Seas. But no one has tried using all that data to create a timeline.

*** Get it, turf?

Book update

My publisher just showed me a mockup if the book cover. There are some changes that we want to try out. When everyone is agreed on a version, I'll get to show you all. There've been some delays at the publisher (they moved their editorial offices) and my release has been bumped back to June. This gives up plenty of time to work on a pitch to out friends as to why woolly mammoths are the perfect summer read. More to come...

Now what am I supposed to do?

Have I mentioned lately that I was writing a book? Yep, little, old me. Saturday, I finished it. It's written, proofed, noted, biblographied, illustrated, and captioned. Then I tied it up with a virtual bow and shipped it off to my agent. It weighs in at a petite 88,592 words. This morning I heard back from her. She thinks it's satisfactory, or, as she put it, "You are amazing! Not many first time authors (or seasoned ones!) can deliver so complete—and to my quick perusal—excellent, an enchilada on such a tight timeline." I am rather proud of my enchiladas.

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.

Book update

We sold the book.

I've been holding my breath over this, but it finally came together today. Last spring I started sending lots of query letters to agents. In June, one asked to see my full proposal. A few days later, she asked to talk to me. At the end of the talk, she offered to represent me. I accepted and she sent me a contract. After that, we worked on improving my proposal and working up a better sample chapter. Just before Thanksgiving she said she thought it was ready and that she was sending it out to publishers. The week before Christmas, two publishers wrote back asking for more information. One was a small university press. The other was a major publishing house. Ten days ago, the University press made an offer. It was a much smaller offer than I had hoped for, but it was exciting to think that, no matter what happens, the book will see the light of day.

Fast forward to today. We still haven't heard back from the big publishing house. It's Friday. There was only junk mail in my box. Considering the time difference, it was already after lunch in New York. I figured that meant I wasn't going to hear anything this week. I deleted all the junk mail and as Gmail refreshed, a new letter appeared from my agent. A third press was interested and was making an offer. The new offer was more money, greater marketing mojo, and a hardback release sooner than the university offer. Other than the million-dollars-and-a-cheese-sandwich offer that I never really expected to get, this was everything I had realistically hoped for. I wrote back basically saying "OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG, YES!!!"

The normal procedure, at this point is to notify anyone else who has expressed an interest to see if they want to start a bidding war. An hour later, my agent wrote back to say, this morning's publisher raised their bid and the other two dropped out. Most people who have met me will say that, with exceptions that don't need to be listed here, I'm usually a fairly reserved person. I was screaming and dancing in the kitchen. "Tell them yes! Tell them yes! Tell them yes!!!!"

And that, dear friends, is where we stand. The publisher will send a formal contract to my agent stating the terms of the bid; she'll examine it and, if everything is above board, send it to me to sign; I'll fall to the floor in a swoon, then get up; and sign it. Naturally, about five minutes after I gave her my permission to accept the bid, my impostor syndrome kicked into overdrive. Unless some drunken prankster in mail-room of the publisher sent the bid, I now have four months to deliver a draft.

It's finally real. Ever since I was a teen-ager, I've wanted to be a writer. My topic has changed over the years: first I want to be a science fiction novelist, then I wanted to make important contributions to my fields of graduate study (modern Balkans and colonial Africa). After dropping out of grad school, I became a technical writer. It was pretty cool to fill out the "Occupation" box on my tax forms with "Writer" even if the writing wasn't that exciting. Blogging was a little more satisfying, but eventually that became harder to do as traffic dried up. Somewhere along the way I stumbled into mammoths. It was nothing more than a blog post that I meant to use to illustrate a different point. Nine years later, it's a book. I think on my next tax form I might write "Author."