Ben's kite

On this day in 1752, Ben Franklin decided to fly a kite...

His complete letter, as first published, is here.

An early description of permafrost

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, permafrost was a very strange idea to European scientists. The word wouldn't be coined until 1943. The earliest descriptions from the century before were simply of frozen ground running deeper than it should. The idea was completely alien to anything they understood. If the ground was deeply frozen, how could trees grow? Any mining engineer could tell you that it gets hotter as you go down, not cooler. No, they determined, deeply frozen ground was just a myth of superstitious natives.

In 1806, while traveling on the Arctic coast near the Lena delta, Mikhail Adams made some passing references to permafrost that included, as far as I can tell, the first short descriptions of ice wedges and patterned ground. Adams came to the coast attempting to recover a frozen mammoth. Prior to his trip, fewer than a half-dozen mammoth carcasses had been described and one woolly rhinoceros had been recovered. None of these descriptions described them as being frozen, only buried. Adams, in describing his mammoth specifically went into the fact that it had first been sighted in frozen soil. While at the discovery site, he made some casual observations of the place where it was found that included more details than simply stating that the ground was frozen.

First, a few words about permafrost. Permafrost is much more that frozen mud with a foot or so of mushy mosquito maternity wards (tundra) on top, though that's what it mostly is. It's actually a very complex geological phenomenon that still isn't completely understood. Permafrost can contain walls of almost pure ice (ice wedges), mysterious round hills that look like burial mounds (pingos), thousands of small oval ponds that appear and disappear (thermokarst lakes), and rings on gravel beaches and mile after mile of honeycomb patterns on the ground (patterned ground).

Patterned ground is caused by ice wedges. Very simply put, cracks form in permafrost in polygonal patterns similar to cracks in dried up lakebeds during a drought  The case is different but the appearance is the same and the permafrost patterns are much larger. During the summer, melt water fills the cracks. The next winter, the ice expands, as ice will and that widens the crack. The next summer more water can get in, which widens the crack even more. Repeat for a few decades and the permafrost will be thoroughly broken up into a pattern. Because the ice wedge also expands upward, it will create the rice paddy pattern below (Fig. 1). Later in the summer, when the wedge has melted some, the pattern will be the exact opposite with the cracks being lower than the permafrost blocks.

 Fig. 1. Patterned ground. Source.

Back to Adams. The place where Adams recovered his mammoth was a bluff overlooking the sea. Rather than looking at the permafrost through a hole dug into it from above, he has able to see a huge slice of it. The bluff he looked at was well over a hundred feet tall and several miles long. The mammoth had eroded out of a relatively high point on the bluff and tumbled to the beach. While waiting the boat that would take him and his mammoth back to civilization, Adams climbed the bluff to a place near where the mammoth had first appeared. He described it thusly: 

Sa substance est une glace claire pure et d'un goût piquant, elle s'incline vers la mer, sa cime est couverte d'une couche de mousse et de terre friable d'une demie archine d'épaisseur. 

My translation of this is: 

Its substance is pure clear ice and has a pungent taste, it leans towards the sea, its top is covered with a layer of moss and soft earth half an archine thick [14 inches]. 

Two different English translations were published, essentially identical to mine. This passage caused some confusion for Nineteenth Century scientists. All other mammoth carcasses discovered in that century were found in frozen mud, not clear ice. Furthermore, the expeditions that visited the site found only mud. They chalked it up to the fact that Adams was a bit flaky and, outside his field, he was botanist, his work was rather sloppy. However, the existence of ice wedges might redeem Adams' reputation. At least, in this instance.

It just happens that Mamontovy Khayata, the place where the mammoth was found, has been the site of a joint German/Russian permafrost research project for the last twenty years. The picture below (Fig. 2.) is of the bluff in 2002. The light section of the bluff is a section of ice wedge. Beyond it is muddy permafrost and beyond that, the beginning of another ice wedge. It's most likely that Adams did, indeed, find clear ice that tasted terrible. 

Fig. 2. Mamontovy Khayata. Source.

On to the polygons. After examining the bluff, Adams walked inland to collect plant samples. He also poked at the tundra to see if the thickness changed. He saw a great amount of drift wood both on the shore and on the hills. The wood on the hills his Evenki hosts called Adam's wood. The wood on the beach, which came down the Lena every spring, they called Noah's wood. First Adams' comments on the Lena floods: 

J'ai vu dans les grandes fontes de glaces des grosses mottes de terre se détacher des collines, se mêler à l'eau et, former des torrens épais et argilleux qui roulent lentement vers la mer. 

All three English translations agree on the substance of this sentence. 

I have seen, in great thaws, large pieces of earth detach themselves from the hillocks, mix with the water, and form thick and muddy torrents, which roll slowly towards the sea. 

The next sentence is the one that I think describes patterned ground. 

Cette terre forme des figures de coins qui s'enfoncent entre les glaçons. 

The first published English translation (1807) reads: 

This earth forms in different places lumps, which sink in among the ice. 

The second English translation (1820) reads: 

This earth forms wedges which fill up the spaces between the blocks of ice. 

Finally, my crude translation: 

This earth forms figures, which settle among the ice. 

Mine, more or less, agrees with the first, but I've discovered errors in the first. The very reason I've made my own translation is to figure out which one is right when I discover variations. I've also retranslated two German translations because I'm that anal.

In context, the earth (terre) he mentions must be the same muddy earth that he saw during the spring thaw. That would be the same frozen mud that makes up the majority of permafrost. This ice (glaçons) should be the same as the ice (glace) he saw on the bluff face. Knowing what we know about permafrost, it makes much more sense for the earth to be surrounded by ice and not for the ice to be surrounded by earth. The Germans agree with me, though they also call the earth wedge-shaped (diese Erde bildet sodann keilförmige Figuren, welche sich zwischen den Eisschollen festsetzen). If anyone is fluent in French I'd like your opinion on this passage.

Ultimately, it's not important whether or not he got all of the details right. The important thing is that, at that early date, he mentioned the figures on the surface of the ground and correctly identified the underlying structure as being made up of separate parts of ice wedges and regular frozen mud permafrost. At a time when many scientists didn't even recognize the reality of permafrost, that was quite an accomplishment.

Best science headline of the year

This belongs on a top ten list.

A bold alternative to string theory

Yarn Theory
It's best described using fuzzy math.

Tabbert's sea-mammoth

Sweden's rise as a major European power was abruptly ended in 1709, when an army led by King Charles XII was defeated by the army of Peter the Great at Poltava in far-away Ukraine. Charles, badly wounded, barely escaped by dashing south into Turkish territory. The majority of his army, their escape cut off by Russian cavalry, surrendered and became prisoners of war. Somewhat ironically, this national tragedy for Sweden, and personal tragedy for the prisoners and their families, turned out to be a bonanza for European science. When the prisoners returned to Sweden, they brought back information about lands rarely visited by literate Europeans. The prisoners solved some scientific mysteries, created some new ones, and, for others, added new layer to the mystery without solving them. In the last category was the enigmatic beast known by the name of mammoth.

One of the many, many injustices of war is the uneven treatment of prisoners. Officers are almost never treated as badly as enlisted men. The prisoners of Poltava were no exception. The common soldiers were marched off to labor in the frozen swamps of the Neva delta building Peter's new capitol city. For them, captivity was brutal and many died before the final peace was signed and they could be freed. Their officers were exiled to Tobolsk, the capitol of Siberia, and surrounding areas. Once they arrived in their places of exile, the Swedish officers were allowed considerable freedom. The highest officers were treated as honored guests and lived in the homes of the local political elite. Lower officers were allowed freedom of movement in the district, but left to their own devices to make a living. Many of them became ivory carvers.

The state of war between Sweden and Russia lingered on for twelve years after the Battle of Poltava. Swedish officers became a permanent fixture in Tobolsk. Siberia had never seen so many educated men. Once it became clear that they would not be going home any time soon, the officers busied themselves learning about their new home. Curiosity and boredom were their main motives, but gathering intelligence for Sweden played a role, too. Various officers collected information about the geology, resources, history, anthropology, languages, and natural history of the remote parts of Russia. Some of the educated Swedes turned to teaching. Voltaire tells us that they were so highly esteemed that the great families of Moscow sent their children to Tobolsk to be taught by them. When Peter realized what a resource he had in the Swedish officers, he hired many of them satisfy his restless curiosity. When the Treaty of Nystad was finally signed in 1721, formally ending hostilities and freeing the Swedish officers to return home, Peter asked some of them to stay and continue working for him. Most politely refused.

At the meeting of the Swedish Literary Society (formerly the Royal Society of Sciences) held on December 14, 1722 in Uppsala, the society's founder Erik Benzelius exhibited a drawing that he had received from Baron Leonard Kagg, an officer just returned from Siberia. Kagg had told Benzelius that the drawing, labeled "Behemoth" and "Mehemot," was of the mammoth. The mammoth was something of a mystery in 1722. A little over thirty years before, ivory had begun to trickle into Europe from Siberia, the source of which was a creature called "mamant" or "mammot." In 1722, there were only a half dozen published accounts that mentioned the creature. None of the writers had seen a live mammoth and drew on hearsay to speculate about what kind of animal it was. All except one of those writers spoke of the ivory being dug from the ground where the mammoth beast lived. All of the writers, again except one, believed the mammoth was an elephant-like creature, but were at a loss to explain how elephants came to be in Siberia unless their corpses had been washed there by the Flood and had laid frozen in the earth ever since. These accounts all mentioned that the non-Russian Siberian natives believed the mammoth was a still-living subterranean creature that died when it was exposed to surface air. The one account that disagreed with the others was that of the Jesuit Philippe Avril who had been told that the Siberians hunted live sea-mammoths on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The Swedish Literary Society was happy to get any new information that might clear up the nature of the mammoth. But the mystery was not to be solved that easily.

The drawing Kagg brought was of a animal with a cow-like body, long horns twisted around each other, a lion's tail, and large feet with long, curved claws. The drawing came with the following description:

The length of this animal, called Behemot, is 50 Russian ells [29 meters or 69 feet]; the height is not known, but a rib being 5 arshin long [3.55 m or 11.66 ft], it may be estimated. The greatest diameter of the horn is half of an arshin [35 cm or 14 in], the length slightly above four; the grinders like a square brick; the foreleg from the shoulder to the knee 1 3/4 arshin long [124 cm or 4 ft], and at the narrowest part a quarter in diameter. The hole in which the marrow lies is so big that a fist may be inserted, otherwise the legs bear no proportion to the body, being rather short. The heathens living by the River Obi state that they have seen them floating in this river as big as a "struus," i.e. a vessel which the Russians use. This animal lives in the earth, and dies as soon as it comes into the air.

The Behemoth of Siberia.
Society members Olaus Rudbeck and Petrus Martin thought that the animal was a sea creature. They supported their opinion with the fact that several returning prisoners had mentioned dead mammoths mostly being found on the banks of rivers and near the Arctic Ocean. Rudbeck pointed out the curious detail in the drawing that the animal had both claws and horns. No other mammal they knew of had both. The Society decided to write to Kagg to find out how he had obtained the drawing and if he could give them any other information about it. The minutes of the meeting end with the statement, "There is a description about this Mehemot in Capt. Müller's account of the Ostiaks."

Captain Johann Bernhard Müller was captured after the defeat at Poltava and sent to Tobolsk along with the other Swedish officers. In 1712, Tsar Peter hired Müller to travel among the Ostiaks (now known as Khanty) along the Ob River between Tobolsk and the Arctic Ocean. Müller completed his report four years later and sent it to St. Petersburg with a flattering dedication to Tsarina Catherine. Peter was so pleased with the report that he allowed it to be published abroad even before Müller was allowed to leave the country. The report was published in Berin in 1720, in English the following year, and in most of the other major European languages before the end of the decade.

Müller's description of the mammoth, which he calls "mamant," appears at the beginning of the report as part of a description of the resources of Siberia. He uses the word mamant to describe just the ivory. It is worth quoting at length, both because it shows the extreme rumors then in circulation regarding the mammoth, and because it is so entertaining.

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. Others again maintain that they are the Horns of a live huge Beast, which lives in Morasses and subterraneous Caves, subsisting by the Mud, and working it self by the Help of its Horns through the Mire and the Earth; but when it chances to meet with sandy Ground, the Sands rowling after it so close, that by reason of its Unweildines, it cannot turn itself again, it sticks fast at last and perishes. I have spoke to many Persons, who averred to me for the greatest Truth, that beyond the Beresowa, they saw such Beasts in Caves of the high Mountains there, which are monstrous according to their Description, being four or five Ells high [2 m or 6-7 ft], and about three Fathoms long, of a greyish Coat, a long Head, and a very broad Forehead, on both sides of which just above the Eyes, they say, stand the foresaid Horns, which it can move, and lay cross-ways over each other. In walking it is said to be able to stretch it self to a great Length, and also to contract it self into a short Compass. Its Legs are, as to Bigness, like those of a Bear.

Müller went on to discuss whether mammoth ivory is real ivory or some mineral (Ebur fossile) that merely looks like ivory. He was inclined toward the latter opinion, but admitted that stories of the ivory being found with bloody bones argued for the former. In either case, he utterly rejected the idea that it came from elephants killed in the Flood: "the Notion that these are real Elephants Teeth, cannot be supported by any probable Argument." Müller's mammoth was much smaller than Kagg's, but matched it in other respects, such as the horns being mounted on the forehead. Müller is the only source that mentions live mammoths living in the mountains or it having an inchworm-like ability to change length.

The Society took up the question of the mammoth several times through the course of the next year. On January 11, Martin reported that he had carefully examined the works of zoology, but could find no sea animal like the one in Kagg's drawing though, in his opinion, it resembled the Nile hippopotamus. Benzelius announced that a Lt. Col. Schönström would be sending them a complete tusk for their examination when he returned from Siberia. At the next meeting, a letter was read from the linguist Johan Sparfvenfelt concerning the relation between the words "mammont" and "Behemoth." Finally, on February 15, Benzelius was able to report back to the Society with Kagg's answers to their questions. Unfortunately, most of his answers were "I don't know." Kagg wrote Benzelius that he had received the drawing from one Captain Tabbert and that he, Kagg, had no firsthand knowledge of mammoths. Although Tabbert had returned from Siberia by that time, there is no indication in the Society journals for 1723 that they made any effort to contact him.

Petrus Martin thought Tabbert's mammoth resembled a hippopotamus, an observation that makes more sense when you know that they believed the hippo to be a carnivorous monster. This 1681 illustration from Hiob Ludolf's Historia Aethiopica not only characterizes the hippo as a ferocious beast and also identifies it as the Biblical Behemoth.
Captain Tabbert was Philipp Johann Tabbert von Strahlenberg*, another captive officer who had made good use of his time in Siberia. Tabbert spent his early years of his captivity working for the director of mines and was allowed to travel and collect geographic information. The map he eventually produced was a tremendous improvement over previous maps of Northeast Asia and the first to use the Ural Mountains as a border between Europe and Asia. He followed up his map by collecting comparative lexicons of thirty-two Siberian languages, tracing pictographs in Central Asia, and he wrote the first description of the psychoactive properties of magic mushrooms (Amanita muscaria). As many of his fellow prisoners were employed in ivory carving, he would have been familiar with mammoth tusks from the earliest days of his captivity, but it was a trip he made at the end of his captivity that was most important to Tabbert's understanding of mammoths.

During the summer of 1720, a gloomy German doctor named Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt arrived in Tobolsk on a mission from the Tsar to conduct a survey of medicinal plants in Siberia. His written instructions also directed him to gather "all the curiosities to be found in the region of Siberia, including objects of antiquity, pagan idols, [and] large mammoth bones...." With his wide ranging interests, Peter was, of course, aware of the mysterious mammoth. In his efforts to find new sources of revenue to pay for his wars and new capitol city, he had declared a royal monopoly over the ivory trade. But, being Peter, he wanted to know what the mammoth was and he wanted to have one for the Kunstkammer, his personal museum. Messerschmidt spent the winter in Tobolsk planning his expeditions and gathering information from the locals. By the end of the winter, he had come to regard Captain Tabbert as an indespensible intellectual companion and gained permission for Tabbert to accompany him on his travels as his assistant. The two worked together for over a year. In May, 1722, they arrived in Krasnoyarsk where Tabbert learned that the war was over and he was free to return home.

During their year together, Tabbert and Messerschmidt actively investigated the mammoth question. During the winter in Tobolsk, as they prepared for their summer expedition, they interviewed Siberian merchants to find out what they knew about mammoth remains. During their travels, they gathered mammoth bones in addition to the familiar ivory. No doubt, they discussed their ideas about the beast while they were on the road. It was Tabbert's bad luck that the one time he could have seen mammoth remains in situ, he and Messerschmidt were traveling separately and only the doctor was able to examine the site. When Tabbert returned to Sweden, all of the samples stayed with Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt did ship some molars and a piece of tusk to a scientific colleague in Danzig, Poland, but these samples would be unknown to the Tabbert and the Swedes until years after the discussion of Tabbert's drawing was over.

The earliest date I can find for Strahlenberg and the Society making contact with each other is June 11, 1724. On that date he arrived at a dinner of the Society and dazzled them with tales of "strange ice caves, about all sorts of unfamiliar fruits and trees, petrifications, deer, reindeer, mountain goats, elk and deer on the Yenisey, Tomski and several other rivers, and of Ostiaks on the Obi River, who said they 'come from a country-called Suomi-roll, which could be none other than Finland.'" If Strahlenberg said anything about mammoths beyond general comments about Petrifactions, it wasn't memorable enough for the Society to record in its journal. However, we have a good idea what he could have said because he later published it in his book about Siberia.

At four pages, Tabbert's is the longest account of any of the early Siberian travelers. In it, he uses the word mammoth to describe the whole animal, not just the ivory. He begins by repeating many of the points made by the others. The bones and teeth of mammoths are found in the spring when the floods wash them out of riverbanks. The teeth (as he calls them) can be made into anything ivory can. He is sure that it is real ivory and not a mineral. After a long discussion of the etymology of the name (which he is certain derives from Behemoth), Tabbert finally addresses the question, what kind of animal was the mammoth? "But this is not so readily answered," he admits.

[Muller] says, That these animals were nine Russian Ells long; But an ancient Painter, one Remessow, a native of Russia, who liv'd at Tobolsky, informed me, in the presence of Dr. Messerschmidt and many others, that he and thirty more of his Companions had seen between the Cities of Tara and Tomskoi, near the Lake call'd Tzana Osero, an entire Skeleton of one of these Creatures, thirty-six Russian Ells long, lying on one Side; and the Distance between the Ribs on one Side, and the other, was so great, that he, standing upright, on the Concavity of one Rib, could not quite reach the inner Surface of the opposite Rib with a pretty long Battle-Axe which he held in his Hand. To which may be added, that, not only, almost all over Siberia, there are found Jaw-Teeth or Grinders of twenty or twenty-four Pounds Weight each, and Bones of a vast Bigness; but Dr. Messerschmidt himself has seen the Bones of an whole Skeleton, of a monstrous Size, lying in a Heap in a Ditch between Tomskoi and Kasnetsko, on the banks of the river Tomber. Besides, every one of the Swedish prisoners, must remember that a Head of one of these Creatures is to be seen in the city of Tumeen, two Ells and a half long, which the Russians reckon to be one of the smallest Size. Considering what has been said, it is not to be believed that these Bones are Minerals and a Lusus naturae; And if we look upon the mighty Size, and take notice both of a whole Skeleton, and the Teeth, and at the same Time, take Notice their Crookedness, it is as impossible that they should be the Remains of Elephants. I have, indeed, formerly thought them to be Relics of Elephants ever since the flood; but there is no Manner of Proportion between them and the Skeleton of this huge Animal; I am therefore constrain'd to believe, that these Teeth and Bones are of sea animals, such as the Danes formerly us'd to bring from Greenland and Iceland, and sell for those of Unicorns. This might be illustrated by comparing those with these, especially that Tooth or Horn which is to be seen in the Musaeum of the King of Denmark.

Tabbert goes on to conclude that the mammoth was not a land animal, nor was it an amphibious animal that lived on the banks of rivers. He believes that it was a sea creature that lived in the Arctic Ocean before the Biblical Flood and that the bones found in his day were the remains of sea-mammoths stranded when the Flood's waters receded. He does not express an opinion as to whether or not sea-mammoths still exist. He concludes by saying that he's open to changing his mind if anyone should come up with a better solution.

Tabbert does not include a drawing of the mammoth in his book, but is clear that what he has in mind is nothing like the mammoth we know. A close reading of his account reveals that most of what he is describing is hearsay. The two complete skeletons he mentions were described to him by the painter Remessow and by Messerschmidt, who saw the skeleton when they were traveling apart. Messerschmidt left most of the bones of that mammoth behind, collecting only a molar and a part of a tusk. Strahlenberg clearly hasn't seen the narwhal horns in the Danish Kunstkammer or he would have known that they bear no resemblance to a mammoth tusk. It's not clear the ever saw a complete mammoth skull. He says the Swedish prisoners all knew there was a large skull in Tyumen, not that he had seen it. Messerschmidt sent a skull back to Europe, be he collected it the year after he and Tabbert parted ways. If Tabbert really had seen a mammoth skull, it's hard to see how he could have constructed the head that placed on his drawing.

Tabbert's mammoth drawing appears to a collage made from different sources, tusks and bones that he saw himself and tales recounted by others. Some of those tales were probably honest miscommunications while others, such as Remessow's giant, were likely tall tales. It's also possible that of the bones that he did see, not all of them were from mammoths. The head and body of his sea-mammoth are much easier to understand if we assume he was basing his reconstruction, at least partly, on the skull and bones of a woolly rhinoceros.

The skull of the Lindworm, or dragon of Klagenfurt, discovered in in 1335. In 1840 Franz Unger recognized the skull as being from a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis).
Whatever Strahlenberg said about mammoths in his dinner conversation with the Society, it wasn't enough to satisfy the members, who continued to send out letters requesting new information. Any time an officer returned from Russia with a bone or piece of ivory that was believed to come from a mammoth, the Society asked to see it. On October 3, 1723 Benzelius exhibited a part of a jaw of a mammoth brought back by Capt. Clodt von Jürgensburg. The next month, he brought in a "part of the tusk of a Behemoth, which was exactly like ivory." Finally, in 1725, Benzelius acquired the best testimony to date through the intermediary of Lt.Col. Peter Schönström, who had been mentioned in minutes two years earlier as the possible owner of a complete tusk.

Schönström had been the private secretary to King Charles at the time of the Battle of Poltava but was not part of the party that escaped with the king. In Solikamsk, where he spent his POW years, he was allowed access to old Russian and Tartar records that he studied for clues to early Scandinavian history. While there, he became acquainted with a veteran from the winning side at Poltava: Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev. The meeting might not have been an accident. Tatishchev was the director of mines for the Ural district, and Schönström was the cousin of Emanuel Swedenborg the assessor of the Swedish Board of Mines (and later a famous mystic). Following Schönström's return to Sweden, Tatishchev received permission to travel in Sweden where he and Schönström's cousin probed each other for intelligence on the mining and industrial capabilities of the other's country.

Tatishchev used his time in Sweden to pursue far more than his official goals. Like Schönström, Tabbert, and many others, he was deeply interested in the human and natural history of the northern countries. Tatishchev collected books, visited achieves, and sought out Swedish scholars. He visited Tabbert, whom he had also become acquainted with and, for a time, employed, in Siberia, at his home in Stockholm where he helped the former POW edit a manuscript that he was writing about the history of Siberia. In the spring of 1725, Tatishchev met with Benzelius. At some point, the conversation touched on the mammoth. Tatishchev revealed that during his own travels in Siberia, he had done some research into the subject. Benzelius asked the Russian to write a paper on the mammoth for the Society's journal. Tatishchev's paper is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to the mammoth.

While Tabbert, Müller, and others before them had asked around about mammoths and sought out bones to examine, Tatishchev used his official authority to make systematic enquiries. As director of mines and governor of the Urals, Tatishchev was tasked with cataloging the resources of the district. To this end he developed a questionnaire that he sent to officials around the country. On section specifically asked about "subterranean petrifactions" and reminded the officials of their duty to report discoveries to the tsar. Tatishchev was able to acquire three good tusks. The first he sent to the tsar for his collection, the second to the Imperial Academy, and the third he kept for himself and had carved into "various pieces of work."

The paper that Tatishchev wrote for the Swedish Society covered much of the same ground that Müller and his predecessors had. Like all of the observers so far, his main focus was on the ivory if the animal he called "mamont". There is no doubt in Tatishchev's mind that the ivory is of an organic, and not mineral, nature; he calls it bone or horn throughout his paper. He mentions how the ivory is found eroding out of riverbanks in the far North every spring. He describes the texture of the ivory and lists the uses to which it is put. He repeats the primary theories of its origin: the natives believe the bones are the remains of a giant mole-like creature that lives underground while learned men believe they are the remains of elephants either brought there by the flood or by ancient armies. So far, there is nothing new here. Where Tatishchev outdoes his predecessors is in examining bones and ground in a way that is unmistakably scientific.

He measured the size and shape of the tusks he found and describes how they differ from and an elephants. He examined the chemical content of the ivory before declaring it to be of an organic, and not mineral, nature. He sought out other bones to study (much as Messerschmidt was doing at the same time). Sadly, the only skull he found was too "spoiled by age" for him to determine just how the ivory had been attached but, it was big enough, in his opinion, to be an elephant's. His most original contribution is in examining the native belief that the mammoth is an animal that burrows through the Earth. Most travelers had dismissed the idea as a superstition of savages. Tatishchev does too, but before coming to that conclusion, he tested a part of it.

Besides the simple fact that the bones were found underground, Tatishchev's informants gave him one other piece of evidence for their belief that the mammoth was a burrowing animal.

Besides, they tell, that some have obferv'd the earth rais'd into mounds, which happen'd while this animal was busy below in digging; and when he proceeded farther on, that the earth subsided again; and that, therefore, he left a tract or certain pit in the surface of the earth; as the trace of his subterraneous passage.

Such humps and pits, both small and large, are common and mysterious features of permafrost soils. At the time, most European scientists did not believe that deep frozen soil could exist. Didn't miners report the Earth getting warmer as they dug deeper? The very existence of permafrost wouldn’t be accepted until the middle of the nineteenth century and a detailed understanding of it's behavior wouldn't emerge until after WWII. We still don't completely understand it. Because he spent several years in and near the permafrost zone, Tatishchev knew that frost heaves and melt pockets were real and that they needed to be explained. His explanation of the pits is that they are sink-holes:

I afterwards enquir'd into those pits, which this animal was said to form as it walk'd under ground, and, I view'd them in different places, and I think I have discover'd what they are, namely, cavities and passages form’d by subterraneous waters; whence the incumbent, earth afterwards unexpectedly fell in; for, in Permia, upon examining such a pit, I found a torrent of water gliding under a hill.

With all the available evidence laid out before him, Tatishchev concluded that neither the "simple and credulous" natives nor the learned were on the right track. He was confident that he had disposed of the idea that the mammoth could be a subterranean animal. He thought it unlikely that the Flood would have swept elephants up in the tropics and deposited them in Siberia alone. As to an invading army with war elephants, there was no other evidence of such an event and it failed to explain how the bones became so deeply buried. Tatishchev didn't believe the ivory came from elephants at all. He thought ", that they are rather to be reckon'd to the class of horns than of teeth, and that they were parts of an animal different from an elephant." He also thought that there might be something to the Ostiak belief that the mammoth had movable horns.

Tatishchev's paper didn't go very far toward solving the mystery of mammoth ivory for the Swedish Society. After three years they had five possible explanations. Siberian natives thought mammoth ivory was the horn a giant mole-like creature. Russians living in Siberia thought it was the remains of elephants brought from somewhere else, probably by the Biblical Flood. Müller believed that mammoth ivory wasn't from an animal; he thought it was a mineral that grew in the Earth like coal or rock salt. Capt. Tabbert thought it was the tooth of a sea mammal, possibly related to the narwhal. Tatishchev thought it was the horn of a giant, as yet undiscovered, buffalo-like creature. The one man who had proof of the elphantine nature of the mammoth was Messerschmidt. A year after he and Tabbert serperated, he acquired a complete mammoth skull in excellent condition. However, during the years the Swedish Society was looking into the question, he making his way deeper into Siberia, nearing the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese frontier. None of Messerschmidt's notes were published during his lifetime. Indeed, most of them languished in boxes in the archives of the Russian Academy until the 1960s.

Messerschmidt's drawing of a mammoth skull. The skull itself was lost soon after he returned to St. Petersburg in 1728 and his drawing was not published until another ten years had passed.
If the investigations of the Swedish Academy and Tatishchev did not solve the mystery of the mammoth, they nevertheless mark an important transition. Before their investigations, information about the mammoth was anecdotal, collected by travelers and lexicographers and presented in the context of of much larger projects. The Academy and Tatishchev brought the mammoth to the forefront, made it a subject of study in its own right, and systematically gathered information about it. The questions they asked and the methods they employed were becoming more recognizably scientific. Tatishchev recognized that more research needed to be done: "I, therefore, conclude, that so long as anyone cannot aver, that he has seen this animal, many doubts must still necessarily remain, which must be left to time and farther observations to clear up."

The fate of the Swedish prisoners after Poltava was a tragedy. Thousands did not survive their captivity. Those who did survive were separated from their families and communities for over ten years. At the same time, the officers' time in captivity produced a treasure trove of scientific progress. Not only did they advance European knowledge of the archaeology, anthropology, geology, geography, and natural history of Russia and Northern Asia, they trained the next generation of Russian scientists and provided them with intellectual contacts in the West. From this, can we come to the Panglossian conclusion that everything works out for the best? I think not. The world would not have been worse off if it had taken us twenty years longer to learn about Siberia and more prisoners had survived. But, I do think it is a powerful example of the power of human curiosity. Even under the worst of circumstances, people will look up and start to ask questions. And, three hundred years later, we can be glad they did.

* Later historians refer to Tabbert as Strahlenberg. He, along with his three brothers, was enobled to that name in 1707 for their military service to King Charles. However, the contemporary sources I'm quoting here all refer to him as Tabbert, making my job just a little more difficult.

The rare mountain mammoth

Last Thursday, Jesse Steele, a heavy equipment operator from Grand Junction, CO, was working on a job to enlarge the little reservoir that provides Snowmass Village with its water. As he pushed some earth into a pile where it would be loaded into dump trucks for removal, he noticed what appeared to be a rib rolling over the blade of his bulldozer. As a matter of fact, bulldozers rarely doze actual bulls, but that was Steele's first thought. Perhaps he had uncovered the bones of a cow or a buffalo. He and some other workers were curious enough that they poked around in the dozed up dirt. What they found were bones that were too big and strange for any local fauna they were familiar with. They passed word up the food chain and by Saturday they knew that they had a mammoth. The water utility threw a fence around the site to keep the bones safe for an orderly excavation.

Mammoth bones are found all the time. Hundreds show up in Siberia each year and a dozen or so in the US. This one is special for two reasons. First it might be almost intact. Most dead animals are picked apart by scavengers, the bones carried away or scattered. Those that stay on the surface decompose. Most of the buried ones eventually erode out and fall apart. Usually when we find the remains of a prehistoric animal, we find only a few bones or fragments of bones. Steele's bulldozer uncovered one side of a young mammoth and the experts from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science believe the rest of the skeleton is still in the ground there. They are still in the first stages of examining the site. It will probably be weeks before they know for sure.

The second interesting thing about this mammoth it that it was found at 8000 feet in the mountains. Elephants can handle some pretty rough terrain, but they aren't mountain goats. A mammoth would have gone where the food is. Mountain meadows would have had some pretty tasty grazing in the summer. But how much food could there have been at that altitude during the end of the ice age?

As a side note, the article about the find, by Brent Gardner-Smith, a staff writer for the Aspen Daily News, is an example of excellent science journalism. First off, he avoids sensationalizing the find. He never once claims this find will solve the mystery of mammoth extinction or that it will be cloned. He works in some nice educational background information, mentioning the two species of mammoth, woolly and Columbian. He supplies important tips for future discoverers of fossils (leave them in the ground and don't let them dry out). Writers for the major news outlets could learn a lot from this small town writer.

Red flag over Luna

I grew up during the space race. I remember watching every satellite launch on television, holding my breath for the first Americans in space, and sitting out one cold night to watch a real satellite pass overhead. I could name all of the astronauts. I built plastic models of capsules, rockets, and satellites. I mourned for Apollo 1, cheered Apollo 8, and held my breath for Apollo 13. But the space race wasn't just the United States rushing into the starry yonder; it was a race against an opponent: the fearsome Soviet Union.

To us civilians, the other side was something of a mystery. We knew they were a powerful and formidable adversary. At the end of WWII, they collected their German scientists and we collected ours. Both sides set their Germans to work doing sciency things that would eventually lead to one of us beating the other and conquering the stars. Yes, the reality was a lot more complicated than that, but that was how things were portrayed to this second-grader in a government town. When I was old enough to first understand, the Russians (as we always called the Soviets) were winning. They built the first intercontinental ballistic missile (the R-7 launcher). They put the first satellite in orbit (Sputnik 1). They put the first animal in orbit (a well-behaved mutt named Laika). They launched the first man to orbit the Earth ( Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1). They sent the first satellite to the moon (Luna 2). They beat us to Venus (Venera 3). They put the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6). The first spacewalk (Alexey Leonov from Voskhod 2). Basically, until the Gemini program began in 1965, they were kicking out butts. When Castro announced the Russians would be putting missiles in Cuba in 1962, it looked like Russian technology was ready to overwhelm and obliterate us.

And then they didn't. We went to the moon and they didn't. We went again and they didn't. We went six times and they never did. We put a lander on Mars and flew past the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and they didn't. Our image of Russia as a serious competitor whose German scientists were just as good as, if not better than, ours slowly faded away. Then the Soviet Union faded away.

The American space program was everywhere during my childhood. The launches were broadcast live on television. Magazines had pictures of the astronauts, the capsules, the rockets, the satellites, the ground crew, and the instruments. After the flights, the capsules toured the country. I built plastic models of all off it. Werner von Braun regularly appeared on the Wonderful World of Disney to explain the American space program to us. By contrast, the Soviets space program was a mystery. Some of that came from our side refusing to give them credit for doing anything except being scary. But most of the mystery came from the Soviets themselves. Launches were not announced in advance and never televised. All we heard were after-the-fact announcements that this or that milestone had been achieved. We had only vague ideas what the hardware looked like and who anyone in the program was except for the successful cosmonauts.

All of which leads me to this. This is the Soviet LK (Lunniy Korabl - Lunar Craft) manned moon lander. The Soviets never publicly talked about it and never released pictures of it. Every thing we know about it has come out since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This lander survives in Moscow Aviation Institute.


The LK was similar in design to the American Lunar Excursion Module, but smaller. The two space programs come up with nearly identical solutions to the problem of putting a man on the moon quickly and on a budget. Two modules were to be launched on a single rocket and docked face to face. Once in lunar orbit, a cosmonaut would enter the landing module for a decent to the surface. After planting a flag and setting up some instruments, the cosmonaut would be launched back into lunar orbit from the landing module. In orbit he would have to reentered the command module. The landing module was to be jettisoned, while the lunar team returned to Earth in the command module. The differences were mostly of size and budget. Only one cosmonaut would have landed on the moon as opposed to the two American astronauts who did during the Apollo missions. There was no direct connection between the landing and command modules; the cosmonaut had to make a spacewalk to move between the two modules. The LEM used one rocket to decent to the lunar surface and another to ascend from it. The LK would have used the same rocket.

None of it ever happened. The LK is a piece of alternate history, a prop for Nixiepunk. But still, it's very cool.

It was the plague

In news that is not surprising, but still interesting, a group of German Anthropologists have confirmed once and for all that the Black Death in the 14th century was caused by Yersinia pestis, better known as bubonic plague or even just The Plague. The study, done at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, extracted DNA from mass graves for plague victims in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Using a variety of tests they eventually located markers that indicated the former presence of Y. pestis.

While most of us were taught the the Black Death was indeed caused by bubonic plague, there have been some historians and scientists in recent years who have questioned that diagnosis. The traditional version was that the plague was carried by rats and transmitted from rats to people by fleas. A major line of argument in the revisionist school challenges this transmission vector, by pointing out that many of the outbreaks during the Black Death happened during the winter when fleas are not active. Another line of argument is based on the Medieval descriptions of symptoms that, while close to those exhibited by Y. pestis, are not quite the same.

The new study answers the second of those critiques. Once they found Y. pestis, the Mainz scientists attempted to identify the exact strain of the disease. What they discovered were two strains that don't match the known modern strains. One of the two appears to be completely extinct while the other appears to be related to modern strains found in Asia. If the epidemic was caused by different strains than the ones we know, then it makes perfect sense for the symptomology to be different that that which we know.

This discovery leads to a new challenge to the traditional historical narrative of the Black Death. That narrative has the plague initially being brought from the Crimea to Italy by rats on Genoese ships. From Italy the disease spread through the Western Mediterranean, up into Western Europe, then across Central and Northern Europe before disappearing back into the East. Finding two strains implies two separate epidemics at the same time. One from the Mediterranean and one from the North.

I sometimes joke that the one thing that unites history and the sciences is the sentence "It's more complicated than we initially thought." This is a perfect example of that at work. Nailing down the disease and its strains has answered one question and eliminated one challenge to the prevailing theory. At the same time, it leaves one question still open (the flea problem) and created a new challenge. This brings us to the one sentence that unites all scholarly enterprise, "We're going to need to do more work on this."

A bold alternative to string theory

Yarn Theory
It's best described using fuzzy math.

Plagiarism at the BBC

As if the science blogging world wasn't in enough turmoil this week, we have our own little plagiarism scandal to deal with. People who know me, know I have strong feelings about plagiarism. I hate plagiarists. Today we have a successful and established media figure apparently stealing from a fledgling writer and acquaintance of mine.

Last week, Brian Switek published a short piece on his Smithsonian Magazine blog about the discovery of fossil marks left by a dinosaur attempting to dig into a mammal's burrow. Yesterday, Tom Feilden, a science correspondent for BBC Radio 4, published a short piece on his blog that repeats verbatim sentences from Switek's post including an entire paragraph, which Fielden attributes to the discoverer of the fossils. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the apparent copying.

Switek:

On the mammalian score, a specimen of the relatively large Cretaceous mammal Repenomamus robustus described in 2005 was found with the bones of baby dinosaurs in its stomach—-it had apparently fed on young Psittacosaurus shortly before it died.

Feilden:

One clue, which appears to give mammals the upper hand, comes from the fossilised remains of a relatively large mammal, repenomamus robustus, discovered in 2005. It was found with the bones of a baby dinosaur in its stomach--apparently it had snacked on a young psittacosaurus shortly before it died. Score it one-nil to the mammals.

Not only is the wording similar, but notice the placement of the dash and the use of the sports scoring metaphor.

Switek:

The first trace fossil type was made by a digging dinosaur, probably a maniraptoran similar in form to Deinonychus and Troodon. At first glance it doesn’t look like much-—just a lumpy bit of sandstone-—but if you look carefully, a claw impression and numerous downward-arcing grooves can be seen. It appears that the dinosaur was repeatedly sticking its foot into the hole and raking out sediment, a behavior consistent with the idea that these dinosaurs probably did not use their arms to dig because their feathers would have gotten in the way or been damaged.

Feilden:

The first trace evidence shows scraping marks in the sandstone rocks made by a digging dinosaur, probably a deinonychus or Troodon.

Below the claw marks numerous downward arching curves...

[...]

"If you look carefully," professor Simpson says, "it appears that the dinosaur was repeatedly sticking its foot into the hole and raking out sediment. Behaviour consistent with a carnivore digging out its next meal".

Both are short articles; these two examples make up almost half of their lengths. There are similarities and exact borrowings in the rest of the two pieces.

Professor Simpson is Edward L. Simpson, the first author listed on the scientific article that both Switek and Feilden are reporting. It is possible that both writers are borrowing from Simpson. Unfortunately, the article is hidden behind the pay-per-view firewall of the journal Geology, so I cannot check that. I know Switek, so I do not think he is also a plagiarist. However, even if both Switek and Feilden were both plagiarizing the same source in the same way, this would not excuse Feilden or diminish his crime. Plagiarism is almost never a one time thing. Plagiarists usually steal not because they are unimaginative but, rather, because they are lazy and feel pressure to keep producing. If they get away with plagiarism once, they will almost always try it again until it becomes a habit. If someone has the time or the energy, they should look over Feilden's earlier work. If he is a serial plagiarist, he needs to be exposed. If this is his first offense--however unlikely that is--he needs to be smacked hard so he will not try it again.

The BBC needs to investigate this and make a quick and public response.

Lots of happenings

The biggest news is that my friend Bora Živcović, better known to many by his nom de blog, Coturnix, is leaving Scienceblogs as the latest casualty of l'affaire Pepsi. This is probabty the clearest sign that what started as an internal crisis at Seed Media Group is resulting in a permananent and major reorganization of the science blogging world. Bora has been the mother hen for a large chunk of the science blogging world, encouraging writers, herding the group around, and making peace. For the time being, he has moved the A Blog Around The Clock archives to a WordPress site. Bora has been a great support to my own blogging. I'll follow him wherever he goes.

Eric M. Johnson, another casualty of Pepsigate, has yet to find a home for his fine blog Primate Diaries. Several bloggers offered to let him guest blog on their sites if the urge to write hit him before he settled down. I'm pleased to say he took us up on it and that the first stop on the Primate Diaries in Exile Tour is at my blog (below), archy. If the title "Scientific Ethics and the Myth of Stalin's Ape-Man Superwarriors" doesn't perk your interest, I don't know what will.

Finally, it may not be the biggest story in the science blogging world, but it's the most personal for me: my all science and history blog, Mammoth Tales has been invited to join a group. Starting to day MT is part of the Southern Fried Science Network. It's still a little rough, I need to customize the template with some mammoth art, but it has all the posts from the old site and will soon have some new goodies. Go check it out and check out the SFSN blogs while you're there.

Scientific Ethics and the Myth of Stalin's Ape-Man Superwarriors

The following guest post by Eric Michael Johnson is part of his Primate Diaries in Exile blog tour. You can follow other stops on this tour through his RSS feed or at the #PDEx hashtag on Twitter. If this is your first time visiting archy make sure to browse some of the other posts on the blog. Thanks. - EMJ

The anti-Darwin industry among fundamentalist Christians has produced thousands of pages of misinformation in their attempt to tar and feather the theory of evolution. I have responded to many of these false claims previously. However, one assertion that is especially outlandish is that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was a devoted Darwinian who funded a program to create "ape-man Superwarriors" in his goal for world domination. As Creation Ministries, publisher of the Journal of Creation and advocate of a young Earth literal interpretation of the Bible, insisted in 2006:

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to rebuild the Red Army, in the mid-1920s, with Planet-of-the-Apes-style troops by crossing humans with apes. . . Stalin is said to have told Ivanov, "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

Their only legitimate source for the claim comes from a 2002 paper in the academic journal Science in Context, by the Russian historian of science Kirill Rossiianov. Rossiianov's study follows the ill-fated attempt by the Russian physiologist Il’ya Ivanov to cross-breed humans with anthropoid apes. His research offers an important warning about the ethical abuses that can occur when proper standards are not enforced, but Rossiianov’s paper clearly demonstrates that creating "superwarriors" had no part in Ivanov’s work. The alleged quote from Stalin is not found in the paper and there is no evidence that Stalin ever made such a statement. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Creation Ministries’ assertion has absolutely no foundation.

However, why the Soviets would fund such a human-chimp hybridization program in the first place and what can be learned from this sordid tale of ethical misconduct is an important topic and fascinating in its own right. Ivanov represents a scientist, widely respected in his field, whose dedication to find out if something could be done blinded him to ask whether it should be done. It also reminds us of the role that politics can play in the development of scientific research even if the scientists directly involved are not political themselves.

Contrary to the claims of conservative Christians, Il'ya Ivanov’s interest in hybridization occurred long before the Russian revolution of 1917 and had little connection with Marxist ideology. Following his graduation in 1896 with the equivalent of a PhD in physiology, Ivanov conducted research in bacteriology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris before working with the world famous physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Ivanov utilized the same surgical techniques that earned Pavlov a Nobel Prize and was successfully able to extract animal sex glands so as to develop techniques of artificial insemination in purebred horses. This research was subsequently expanded to farm animals more generally and Ivanov became the leading international figure in the study of artificial insemination.

One of the hybrids between zebra and horse produced through Ivanov's research, 1913.
Image from Rossiianov 2002, Central State Archive of the Moscow RegionTsGAMO

Ivanov’s first mention of his idea for using artificial insemination to determine if a human-ape hybrid could be produced occurred at an Austrian zoology conference in 1910. There is no indication that he had any plans to carry out such research at this time. However, seven years after the revolution, in 1924, Ivanov was conducting experiments on sperm disinfection at the Institut Pasteur when he was offered the institute’s support for his hybridization scheme:

They offered Ivanov free access to animals at the institute’s recently organized chimpanzee facility in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of the project.

After several failed attempts to secure funding, Ivanov eventually received $10,000 from the Soviet Financial Commission and his project was subsequently approved by the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Ivan Pavlov was a distinguished member of the Academy and was present the day this decision was made). It was certainly Ivanov’s distinguished reputation that allowed the project to move forward. In his proposal to the Academy he stated that he wanted to test various hypotheses that had been suggested in the scientific literature.

One such hypothesis was that of the German scientist Hans Friedenthal whose analysis of blood cells in 1900 between chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans showed that they were serologically far more similar than had previously been expected. As a result, Friedenthal proposed that anthropoid reproductive cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid between humans and other apes. In the following two decades other researchers, such as the Dutch zoologist Hermann Marie Bernelot Moens and the German sexologist Hermann Rohleder, sought to test this prediction by inseminating chimpanzee females with human sperm. However, their attempts never got beyond the planning stage and, in the case of Moens, his research plans resulted in him being fired from his teaching position.

With his small budget and use of Institut Pasteur’s facility Ivanov and his son traveled to French Guinea in Western Africa to carry out his artificial insemination experiments in March, 1926. However, his research was hounded at every turn. The "research station" had only two veterinarians on staff and Ivanov’s presence resulted in outrage that he might report on the atrocious conditions:

Ivanov explained that the hostility of the station’s staff arose from their fears that he would report back to Paris about the real problems at the facility. According to the documentation that he managed to see, about seven hundred chimpanzees had been bought from native hunters since the founding of the station in 1923, and more than half of them had died before they could be shipped to Paris for biomedical experiments.

Local hunters had kidnapped the chimpanzees from the wild as infants and all were still juveniles when Ivanov arrived. He only attempted to inseminate three females before being forced to abandon the project as useless. Desperate to make use of his limited funding, Ivanov then made the horrific decision to attempt the insemination of African women with chimpanzee sperm without their knowledge. He made a proposal to doctors at a local hospital about his experiment and was ready to proceed when the General Governor of French Guinea, Paul Poiret, rejected the plan. Out of options and funding, Ivanov and his son decided to return home. By the time the two boarded their ship they had been in Africa for just over one month.

Ivanov hoped to pursue his experiment again in Russia through the use of women volunteers (and he found at least one who was willing to participate). However, when word got out that Ivanov had attempted to inseminate African women without their consent he was condemned by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and all support was eliminated. An investigation concluded that Ivanov’s behavior:

[M]ight undermine the trust of Africans in European researchers and doctors and make problematic any further expeditions of Russian scientists to Africa. Thereafter, the Academy did not want to deal with Ivanov and deprived him of any further support.

While some of his previous support was based in the political ideology at the time, there were strong political divisions that split scientific opinion on a range of issues and Ivanov was caught in between. To some Marxists it was hoped that a program of positive eugenics could lead to an improvement in the population similar to Marx’s description of historical materialism. Researchers in this camp, such as Herman Muller, hoped to use "scientific" techniques so parents thought to have a good genetic background would have more children, a policy in sharp contrast to the negative eugenics later employed by the Nazis that emphasized sterilization. Muller and other geneticists hoped that Ivanov’s research could lead to a better understanding of what qualities to look for. However, other scientists rejected genetic research as bourgeois or imperialist and advocated the inheritance of acquired characteristics (what is commonly known as Lamarckism). It was these researchers, led by the charismatic biologist Trofim Lysenko, who had Stalin’s support at the time.

Lysenko rejected genetic inheritance and advocated Lamarckian acquired characteristics.
Image from Soyfer, V. N. The State and Science (Hermitage, New Jersey, 1989).

In a telling example of the political divisions Ivanov became caught up in, Cambridge historian Martin Richards describes how Muller, one of Ivanov's supporters, sent a letter to Stalin advocating a positive eugenic program. However, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Lysenko and his followers had warned Stalin that genetic research would lead to eugenics as well as fascism and, now, Stalin was convinced. Muller was forced to flee Moscow for fear of being arrested and, days later, received word that several of his colleagues were shot as "enemies of the people."

It was in this atmosphere that Il’ya Ivanov met his end. After several additional attempts to receive support for his research without success, Ivanov was caught up in the ideological battle. One of his scientific enemies, Orest Neyman, accused him of "sabotage" because some of his artificial insemination farm instruments had apparently malfunctioned. On December 13, 1930 Ivanov was arrested by the secret police and convicted of "having created a counterrevolutionary organization among agricultural specialists" and banished to Kazakhstan where he died two years later. His main accuser took over Ivanov’s position as head of the laboratory.

This history raises a number of troubling issues. The fact of the matter is that Il’ya Ivanov cannot simply be dismissed as a rogue ideologue abusing science for dubious political purposes. Rather, he was an internationally respected leader in reproductive physiology and the foremost expert at the time on the artificial insemination of farm animals. His human-chimp hybridization experiments came out of collaboration with other respected scientists and with the direct assistance of the Institut Pasteur, one of the leading scientific institutions in the world at the time. Furthermore, while there was apparently no overt racism in his research, his decision to inseminate African women without their knowledge or consent can only be understood in the context of a racist and sexist colonial attitude.

While Ivanov doesn't seem to have had a political motivation for his research, some of those involved in supporting his work certainly did. In this way Ivanov's experiment was only made possible because of a network of individuals and institutions with specific political ambitions even though Ivanov himself wasn't directly involved in them. When we consider scientific experimentation today, where do we draw the line between sound research and ethical violation? In what ways are funding decisions based on political considerations unrelated to the direct question a researcher hopes to answer? How does American power influence scientific research, and what relationship do scientists have with those on the receiving end of this power? Even though no one, other than the scientists involved, were ever hurt by this cross-breeding research it nevertheless raises serious concerns. While the question of the "ape-man superwarriors" myth can easily be discarded after examining this history, other questions are not as easy to dismiss.

References:

Rossiianov, K. (2003). Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes Science in Context, 15 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0269889702000455

Richards, M. (2008). Artificial insemination and eugenics: celibate motherhood, eutelegenesis and germinal choice Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39 (2), 211-221 DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2008.03.005

Indiana Jones and the big-ass disappointment

What a story. Inside one of the most famous tombs in Egypt, archaeologists discover a hidden tunnel carved into the raw stone of a mountain. The tomb of Seti I had been known for over a century when archaeologists discovered the entrance to the tunnel in the 1960s. After removing over three hundred feet of rubble from the tunnel, the diggers gave up without reaching the end or discovering the purpose of the tunnel. It's now fifty years later and the Egyptians are trying again. They have removed another two hundred seventy feet of rubble only to discover that the tunnel leads to... nothing at all. The tunnel, they report, is different that the rest of the tomb. While the tomb of Seti I is famous for its colorful murals, the tunnel is almost devoid of illustration. On of the only inscriptions reads "move the door jamb up and make the passage wider." It took us a half century to discover that the secret of the tunnel is that it is unfinished.


Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass in the tunnel. Source: National Geographic

The strange case of Middendorff's eyeball, revisited

Over the last year, the blog post of mine that has received the most attention has been one entitled "A very brief history of plagiarism" from March 2009. Every couple weeks, someone links to it and I get a tiny burst of new traffic. That post was really nothing more than the answer to a question asked by Coturnix in the comments on an earlier post about one specific case of apparent plagiarism that I had uncovered. I've recently come across some new information on that case that I think continues the story very nicely.

It began on a Friday night in February, last year. I was using Google Books in an attempt to track down the first appearance of the Benkendorff mammoth, a fictitious discovery that had somehow found its way into standard mammoth literature and that refused to go away (I eventually wrote up that story here). Searching a couple of keywords I came across this this phrase in two different books: "Again, in 1843, M. Middendorff found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the ... ." I've discovered plagiarisms before, so this coincidence set off familiar alarms. From there, my reaction follows a predictable pattern; curiosity is followed by disgust which gives way to compulsion and finally obsession. I looked at both books to make sure there were more than a few words shared between them. When I saw that there really were identical passages in both books, I tried to toss them both aside and continue my Benkendorff research. It was a waste of time; I couldn't stop thinking it. An hour later I looked at the books again. I followed the passages backwards and forwards and discovered that the borrowing went on for paragraphs with no end in sight. I determined which book had been published first and went to bed. The next morning I was up early, determined to nail down the extent of the crime.

The two books in question were Through Siberia, published in 1881 by Henry Lansdell, and Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia, published in 1882 by James William Buel. Both books were accounts of the authors' journeys across Siberia, from west to east, with special attention paid to the condition of prisoners and exiles. The two authors followed more or less the same itinerary. The paragraphs that caught my eye appeared in both books as part of an extended digression on the history and resources of the Lena River valley.

In Lansdell the paragraph that originally caught my eye appeared at the end of a three paragraph footnote on pages 289-90:

Again, in 1843, M. Middendorff found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the Yenesei, with some of the flesh in so perfect a condition that it was found possible to remove the ball of the eye, which is preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

In Buel it appeared in the main text on 420:

Again, in 1843, M. Middendorff found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the Yenesei, with some of the flesh in so perfect condition that it was found possible to remove the ball of the eye, which is preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

My first glance the night before had shown that Buel copied all three paragraphs of Lansdell's footnote as well as the paragraphs that appeared before and after the point where Landsdell inserted his footnote. That following morning, working backward and forward from those paragraphs, I figured out that the copying amounted to an entire chapter (13 pages in Lansdell) with only minor differences, mostly additions. Unfortunately, I did the backward comparison before the forward comparison. At the end of Buel's version of the chapter, I found a found a footnote that could have saved me a sleepless night: " For much of the information here given concerning the Lena, I am indebted to Mr. Lansdell's 'Through Siberia.'"

Okay, I thought, Buel isn't the jerk I thought he was. But, the footnote got me wondering how much of Buel's book was original. I searched the text of his book to see if he was indebted to Lansdell anywhere else. The only other place where Lansdell's name appeared in the book was in the introduction.

Several books on life in Russia and Siberia have appeared since the Turko-Russian war, but few that I have read treat the subject in a manner that suggests a personal visit to those countries by the authors. ... During the present year a work has appeared from the pen of Henry Lansdell, entitled "Through Siberia," that has met with much favor because it treats of a country about which so little is known, and because the author claims to have been a missionary and philanthropist. The facts are, however, that this work, I know, from observations made while in Siberia, to be a pure fiction so far as it relates to convict life; its statements concerning the prisons of Siberia are almost as wide of the truth as any of Munchausen's choice yarns. ... The London Graphic, reviewing the book, pronounces it an aggregated canard throughout. ... I was told by many prominent persons in Russia that the Government purchased several thousand copies of Mr. Lansdell's book and has been active in circulating it through several countries, because it represents convict life in Siberia as an existence of elegant ease and epicurean luxury... .

While Buel thought Lansdell's work was good enough that he borrowed an entire chapter from it, when he got around to writing the introduction, Buel damned Lansdell as a liar and a naive, if unwitting, propagandist for the Russian government. Buel wasn't the jerk that I originally thought he was; he was a different type jerk.

This should have been the end of the story, but something still bothered me about the paragraph that first caught my attention. It seemed too familiar. There are only so many ways to tell the same story and I have read about the fresh eyeball in many places. Was it the story that seemed familiar to me or were the actual words rattling around in my memory. I decided to run the first sentence of the paragraph through another search. What I found was page 54 of Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man published in 1878 by John Patterson MacLean, three years before Lansdell's book. It's a book that I had read a month earlier.

In 1843, Middendorff, a distinguished Russian naturalist, discovered a mammoth on the Tas, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the Arctic Circle, latitude 66° 30' North, with some parts of the flesh in a perfect state of preservation. The ball of the eye is in the Museum at Moscow.

In all three books the paragraph before the mention of Middendorff was a description of the famous Adams mammoth, discovered in 1799 (Which I blogged about here). Though different from the MacLean paragraph in wording and length (MacLean's was longer and more detailed), the juxtaposition of the two discoveries looked bad for Lansdell. Lansdell gave no credit to MacLean or anyone else for his mammoth information.

At that point in the game, the score appeared to be: Buel was an ungracious jerk, Lansdell was minor plagiarist, and MacLean... I decided one more search was in order. This time I used the last sentence of the paragraph. This is what I found:

The most recent discoveries made in 1843 by Mr. Middendorff, a distinguished Russian naturalist, and which he communicated to me in September 1846, afford more precise information as to the climate of the Siberian Lowlands, at the period when the extinct quadrupeds were entombed. One elephant was found on the Tas, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the Arctic circle, about lat. 66° 30' N., with some parts of the flesh in so perfect a state that the ball of the eye is now preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

That paragraph appears in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, the 1847 and all later editions. Principles of Geology was Lyell's best known and most important book. It was enormously influential (Darwin read it during his voyage on the Beagle) and most educated Englishmen of the mid-nineteenth would have been familiar with it. It went through eleven editions between 1830 and Lyell's death in 1875. Lyell updated the book in most editions as new data came in. The next few paragraphs in the final (1873) edition of Lyell looked bad for MacLean.

In MacLean, one paragraph after the Middendorff eyeball:

In 1866 many skeletons were found retaining the skin and hair, in the flat country near the mouth of the Yenesei, between lat. 70° and 75° N. The heads of most of them were turned towards the south.

The Academy of St. Petersburg, in 1869-70, sent out an exploring expedition under Herr Von Maydell, to the river Indigiska, to examine some remains said to have been discovered there. The exploring party found the skin and hair as well as the bones of the mammoth at two points on the river, about thirty miles distant from each other, and sixty-six miles from the Arctic Sea.

In the Lyell, two paragraphs after the Middendorff eyeball (p. 183):

In 1866, in the flat country near the mouths of the Yenesei, between lat. 70° and 75° N., many skeletons of mammoths were found retaining the skin and hair. The heads of most of them are said to have been turned towards the south. So late as 1869-70, an exploring expedition was made by Herr von Maydell, under the direction of the Academy of St. Petersburg, to the river Indigiska, to examine some remains said to have been discovered there. We learn from M. Brandt that the travellers found the skin and hair as well as the bones of the Elphas primigenius at two points on the river, about thirty miles distant from each other, and sixty-six miles from the Arctic Sea.

The case against MacLean looks strong, that same order of narrative, similar or exact words. If the prosecution needed more evidence to sew up the case, there is the "river Indigiska," mentioned by both Lyell and MacLean. Indigiska is a misspelling of Indigirka. Lyell footnotes his source for information about the Maydell expedition as an 1871 article by Johann Freidrich von Brandt. I have been unable to lay my hands on a copy of that article, so I can't say whether or not Brandt also misspelled the name of the river. However, it's unlikely that both Maclean and Lyell both stole from Brandt. Brandt wrote in German and for Maclean and Lyell to both use the same words would require them to independently come up with the same translations. That is, as they say, not damn likely.

Unlike politicians, most writers lack underlings to take the blame for their malfeasance and so must find a way to accept responsibility while minimizing the crime. This brings us to the "oops defense" wherein the writer says they meant to credit the original author, but forgot. Nothing to see here, move along. Accepting responsibility for a little incompetence is better than admitting intellectual crimes. Of course, sometimes writers really do forget to insert the footnotes. Which was it with Maclean? I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and say it was the latter. MacLean was very careful in his description of the Adams mammoth use quote marks and give credit to Richard Owen for the six sentences he used. MacLean also gave credit to Lyell for quotes in two other places in the book.

At the end of my investigation last year, the score was: Buel was an ungracious jerk, Lansdell was minor plagiarist, and MacLean (or his editor) was, at best, very sloppy in his work. Only Lyell came out of it looking good. At the time, I had yet to lay my hands on a copy of Middendorff's work on mammoths to see what he had to say and how he said it. Since then, I've acquired some new sources, including Middendorff, that carry the story a little further. I've identified a dozen writers who mention Middendorff's eyeball in more or less the same wording as Lyell used. All but two gave credit to Lyell.

Lyell mentioned the eyeball outside his Principles of Geology. In A Second Visit to the United States of North America (1850) he described the discovery this way:

I refer to the preservation in ice of the carcasses of extinct species of quadrupeds in Siberia; not only the rhinoceros originally discovered, with part of its flesh, by Pallas, and the mammoth afterwards met with on the Lena by Adams, but still more recently the elephant dug up by Middendorff, September, 1846, which retained even the bulb of the eye in a perfect state, and which is now to be seen in the museum at Moscow.

In a widely reprinted speech he gave before the 34th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lyell described the discovery in this manner:

Middendorff, in 1843, after digging through some thickness of frozen soil in Siberia, came down upon an icy mass, in which the carcase of a mammoth was imbedded, so perfect that, among other parts, the pupil of its eye was taken out, and is now preserved in the Museum of Moscow.

There are significant differences in the three accounts Lyell gave of the discovery. In Principles (1847), he says that Middendorff made the discovery in 1843 and reported it to Lyell in 1846. In Second Visit (1850), he says the discovery was in 1846. In his speech before the British Association, the date is again 1843. The simple conclusion is that the date given in Second Visit is a mistake, being the date of Middendorff's letter, not the date of the discovery. Unfortunately, that mistake remained uncorrected in later editions of Second Visit which might have caused some confusion to other scientists trying to follow the progress of mammoth discoveries.

A second discrepancy between the three accounts is Lyell's description of the state of preservation of the mammoth. In Principles, he describes "some parts of the flesh in a perfect state of preservation." In Second Visit, it is "the elephant ... which retained even the bulb of the eye in a perfect state...." In his speech before the British Association, he describes "the carcase of a mammoth was imbedded, so perfect that, among other parts, the pupil of its eye was taken out...." In the first two, he clearly stated that only part of the mammoth was perfectly preserved. In the third case, his implication was that the whole mammoth was perfectly preserved.

From many perspectives, these are both minor details that shouldn't undermine the core dependability of Lyell's work on geology. However, they do render Middendorff's discovery somewhat out of focus. Middendorff's reports on his expedition have never been translated out of German, as far as I can tell. There certainly has never been an English edition published. This means that unless readers have the time to track down the original editions of his work and the ability to translate them, they have had to depend on writers like Lyell to inform them about Middendorff's contribution to understanding mammoths and the Arctic.

Alexander Theodor von Middendorff (1815-1894)
I revisited Middendorff and his mammoth last year while creating a database of all the discoveries of mammoth carcasses. For each discovery, I tried to gather the name of the discoverer, the location, the date of discovery, and some details about each discovery. What I found out about Middendorff's mammoth was that he did not recover his on the Taz River, his wasn't very complete, he did not bring back an eyeball, and what he did bring back went to the St. Petersburg Academy not to the Moscow Museum.

Middendorff left St. Petersburg for Siberia on 26 November 1842. His formal instructions from the Academy of Sciences were investigate the phenomena of permafrost and conduct a survey of the flora and fauna of the Taymyr Peninsula, the northernmost extension of the Eurasian landmass. 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. He returned to the capital in 1845 as something of a scientific celebrity. His letters from the field had been published in the journal of the Academy and a short report was published soon after his return. The Emperor found the report quite interesting and gave all of four he 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 his mammoth while he was on the Taymyr Peninsula. After a series of frustrating delays, the expedition managed to cross the peninsula from southeast to northwest and reached the Arctic Ocean by sailing down the Taymyr River. On 21 August 1843, Middendorff found what he believed were the remains of camp left by Dmitry Laptev a century earlier. Nearby he found the skeletons of two mammoths. The smaller of the two was covered with soil impregnated with a fatty, oily residue, the last remains of its decomposing flesh. Middendorff's reports make no mention of a perfectly preserved eyeball. Just the opposite, in the section of his final write-up dedicated to mammoths, Middendorff expressly denies having found such a thing and expresses some confusion that it had been reported so in Mary Somerville's Physical Geography. Sommerville does not mention Lyell as the source of the information and Middendorff gives no indication of being aware that Lyell was the ultimate source of the rumor. Middendorff refers to Sommerville and the rumor in the context of discussing the Adams mammoth. That animal was recovered in 1806 near the delta of the Lena River, well over a thousand miles east of the Taz. While a desiccated eye was one of the parts recovered by Adams, nothing else about that mammoth matches the mammoth discovery Lyell described. However, there is one mammoth discovery that matches almost it in almost every detail.

In 1840, an entomologist named Mochulsky, who was a member of the Moscow Society of Naturalists, was visiting the Spring market in Tobolsk when he heard about the discovery of a mammoth carcass by a group of Samoyeds. They told him that during the previous year, spring floods had uncovered the front part of a mammoth on the banks of the Taz River. They described the animal as having a black tongue, as long as a month-old reindeer calf (3 to 3 1/2 feet). This was probably a description of the trunk. Because no one had recovered or even seen a mammoth's trunk, Mochulsky was eager to recover the mammoth. Unfortunately, this being Imperial Russia, it took well over a year for Mochulsky to arrange permission and funding. At the beginning of 1842, a merchant named Trofimov headed north to gather the remains.

Another year passed before he appeared in Moscow with a bill for 4690 silver rubles. Trofimov justified the cost by claiming he had traveled over 2000 kilometers before finding the place where the carcass rested. His itinerary seemed to lead to a place far to the northwest of the one the Samoyeds had described to Mochulsky. Karl von Baer, Middendorff's patron at the St. Petersburg Academy, speculated that there might have been two fairly complete mammoths discovered in the region between the Ob and Yenisei Rivers, but did not rule out the possibility that Trofimov was simply padding the bill. The mammoth parts remained in a warehouse in Siberia for another three years while Trofimov and the Moscow Society argued about payment.

The inventory provided by Trofimov listed roughly a half ton of bones, skin, meat, and fat. Most of the skeleton is there, though cut up for easy transport. The soft parts were primarily dried scraps attached to the bones, though about six pounds of unidentified mammoth jerky had also been collected. The receipt mentions "signs of the right eye" being present on the skull. The ivory had been cut off and sold before the Russians were told of the discovery. The government encouraged this practice in the forlorn hope that the locals would be more inclined to report discoveries if they were allowed to keep the most valuable part. It wasn't until sometime in 1846 that the mammoth remains arrived in Moscow.

Middendorff was on his way into Siberia when Trofimov's bill and itinerary arrived in Moscow. He made some enquiries about the location of the find but was unable to shed any light on the question. He completed his expedition to the Taimyr, made a trip to the Pacific Coast, ascended the Amur River, and returned to St. Petersburg all before the mammoth parts made their way to Moscow. Considering the 1846 date, Middendorff's communication with Lyell was probably prompted by news of the Moscow naturalists finally getting their hands on their mammoth.

from my perspective, two mysteries remain. What exactly did Middendorff communicate to Lyell? Lyell's published letters do not include and anything from Middendorff. Has a letter or not survived among Lyell's papers? Maybe there is a Lyell expert out there who can answer that one for me. The other mystery regards the actual remains. What is stored in the Moscow museum? In the annual Bulletin for 1846 of the Moscow Society of Naturalists, Prof. Gleboff published a report on his microscopic examination of the soft tissues of their new mammoth. The paper mentions muscles, tendons, fat, periosteum, and brains, but not the eye. When Middendorff published his own monograph on mammoths in 1860, his expressed annoyance that nothing else had been published about the Moscow mammoth after Gleboff's paper. To my knowledge, nothing ever was.

The story of Middendorff's eyeball persisted among English-language science writers for over a half century after Lyell first mentioned it in 1847. Lyell's prestige, no doubt, lent authority to the anecdote, which was a very colorful illustration of the state of preservation of Siberian mammoth carcasses. The error was not just in attributing the mammoth to the wrong person; Lyell's retelling greatly exagerated the condition of the mammoth. The eye of Mochulsky mammoth was not in a perfect state of preservation. The museum receipt describes it mearly as "signs of the right eye." Lyell's memorable anecdote helped establish in the public mind an image of perfectly preserved mammoths scattered all over Siberia. The truth is that in the last three hundred years, only about a dozen relatively complete mammoths have been found in Siberia and only two of those could really be called perfect.

Even though Middendorff's monograph on mammoths with his clear repudiation of the story was available after 1860, none of the writers thought to check up on the great Lyell. The fact that Middendorff was published in German in Russia made it even less likely that English-language writers would go to the original source. For historians, scientists, and even journalists, the morals of the story should be clear: Check the original data; even the most prestigious authorities make mistakes. The other moral is that plagiarism is bad and will eventually be discovered by OCD insomniacs. But, I'm sure, dear readers, that you already knew that.