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Book Review: The Fate of the Mammoth

© Beverly Eschberger

"This is not a book about mammoths," begins Claudine Cohen intriguingly in The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. "I cannot say exactly when my plan to write a general history of paleontology changed into that of a history of 'systems built on mammoth bones,'" Cohen writes in her Preface. The Fate of the Mammoth may not be a book strictly about mammoths, but it is a fascinating look at the role that the remains of these extinct animals have played in developing the science of paleontology into what it is today.

Cohen has chosen the mammoth as the subject of her book about the history of paleontology because "the mammoth is the totem animal of vertebrate paleontology, but it plays the same role in human prehistory. It is the symbol of a vanished but familiar era, a symbol of those ice ages that in our mind tend to merge with the earliest history of humanity."

I enjoyed following the history of human fascination with the remains of ancient animals. In Part I: Images, Cohen introduces us to some of the ancient ideas of the mammoth. She presents the realistic drawings of mammoths by early humans as well as the rather peculiar drawings made by "modern" humans as they attempted to determine the appearance of the extinct beast whose tusks and bones they found.

In Part II: Myths, Cohen presents some of the earliest essays about the bones of the mammoth. Saint Augustine thought the bones and teeth of mammoths to belong to saints or Biblical humans, who were believed to have been much larger than modern humans. The seventeenth century naturalist and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz mistook mammoth bones for the remains of a "fossil unicorn." It was not until 1692 that the word "mammoth" first appeared in Western European literature, when Dutch naturalist Nicolaas Witsen travelled through northern Russia, where he was shown the bones and teeth of the mammoth. Other European naturalists were shown complete mammoth remains with the tusks and skin still attached, and the mammoth's resemblance to an elephant was finally recognized by European scientists.

It was during the late eighteenth century that the popularity of the mammoth was truly launched. In Part III: Stories, Cohen recounts Thomas Jefferson's hopes to find living mammoths in the unexplored American west. Georges Cuvier benefitted from the French Revolution by the founding of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1793, which replaced the Jardin du Roi. In 1796, Cuvier published Memoire sur les especes d'elephans vivantes et fossiles (Treatise on the species of elephants, living and fossil), in which he wrote that at least two species of elephants exist, "which differ by climate, behaviour, and shape."

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