A few years back,
I mentioned the mammoth book actually was a byproduct of my love of
fringe theories. A lo-o-ong time ago, when I was a teenager, I
noticed that each fringe genre recycled a standard set of evidences
that were proof positive of each writer's preferred theory. For
geological catastrophists, frozen mammoths were right at the top of
the list. Working in bookstores in my late twenties and early
thirties, I played a game of find-the-mammoth with each new
catastrophist book. Very few failed. An important part of the theory
was the idea that mammoths had been frozen so fast that its meat was
still fresh and delicious tasting. This week, one of those stories
about mammoth meat was decisively debunked--not that that will make
it go away.
In the 1690s, the literate
classes of Western Europe became aware of ivory from a mysterious
Siberian creature called mamant or mammoth. The natives said it was
never seen alive. They belived it lived underground and died when it
breathed surface air by accidentally tunneling out of its
subterranean home, usually on river banks. They believed it was a
currently living animal because the meat was fresh enough for their
dogs to eat. None of these stories said that they ate the meat. And,
dogs will eat their own shit, so that's not the best recommendation
for the palatability of the meat. This detail, the freshness of the
meat, was one of the things that made the mammoth so fascinating,
more than any other extinct animal, and kept attention focused on it
for the next century.
Once the mammoth was
recognized, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a unique,
extinct species, native to the North, more focus was placed on just
how it came to be frozen. During the previous century, this was not a
particularly difficult question. The mammoth was an elephant. During
the biblical Deluge, they drowned and their corpses were washed
north. When the waters receded, the now Arctic elephants rapidly
froze. This theory fell into disfavor as the general literary
consensus tipped toward viewing the Deluge as a metaphor or local
event in the Middle East. On the geological side, the concept of
uniformitarianism, that major changes happen very slowly, in small
increments, also denied the idea of a sudden, global flood. This was
immediately followed by the discovery of the ice ages. A slow warming
and cooling world provided many opportunities for mammoths to become
frozen.
Back to the mammoth. By
1850, only fourteen mammoths with some soft tissue attached had been
reported since 1692, only four were supposed to have been relatively
complete, and only one had been recovered. This made it easy to
believe that each frozen mammoth was due to a rare and unique
accident. Today, after 350 years, only seventy-five mammoths with
soft tissue have been reported and only fourteen have been relatively
complete. Due to global communication, the end of the Cold War, a
rapid erosion of of local superstitions, and an appreciation of the
high monetary value of mammoth carcasses, a third of those complete
carcasses were reported and all of them recovered in the last ten
years.
But, John, you may be
asking (go ahead, ask), when did the mammoth feast enter the
mythology? That's a very good question. I commend you on your
persip... perisap... smartness. As I mentioned, the earliest reports
of mammoth meat only mention dogs eating it. Dogs eating the meat are
mentioned again a couple times in the nineteenth century. But, by the
dawn of the twentieth century, I can't find a single account of
humans eating it, let alone it being the main course of a great
feast.
Back to catastophism.
Frozen mammoths are now a staple of catastrophist theories. Frozen
mammoths are among the usual suspects that catastrophists trot out to
prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth’s axis can suddenly change
location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of Egypt, some
cosmological event dumped millions of cubic miles of ice on the
earth, or that the Deluge was real. When any new catastrophist theory
is proposed, frozen mammoths cannot be far behind. The mammoth most
often cited, though often anonymously cited and turned into a plural,
is the mammoth discovered on the Beresovka River in 1900.
This mammoth was only the
second complete mammoth to be recovered. It was found halfway down a
high bluff over the Beresovka River in northeastern Siberia. Its
claims to fame are based on the date of its discovery and its high
degree of preservation. It was only the second relatively complete
mammoth recovered; the first was a century earlier. It was better
documented than the first. Mikhail Adams, who recovered the first
mammoth in 1806, was a botanist who quickly lost interest in it. The
main documentation of it was written by the person who reconstructed
the skeleton, Wilhelm Tilesius, who hated Adams. By contrast, the
Beresovka mammoth was recovered by Otto Herz and Eugene Pfitzenmayer,
who both were interested in the mammoth itself and respected each
other. Finally, they wrote during a time when the interested audience
for information about such discoveries was magnitudes larger than the
audience for the Adams mammoth. They not only wrote several
scientific articles on the discovery, the samples they brought back
allowed other scientists to write papers on it. Pfitzenmayer even
wrote a popular book on mammoths. Quite simply, the world knew more
about this mammoth than any discovered before then and any since
until Dima in 1977.
From here, the details of
this mammoth move into catastophist literature following two paths.
The first is because of the high quality of the remains themselves.
The flesh and even parts of the organs were recognizably intact.
Plant tissues from its last meal were still in its mouth and
identifiable nearly a century before DNA sequencing. All of these
details have led catastrophists to believe the mammoth was frozen
suddenly and completely. An entire industry has grown up around this
belief. Someday, I'll go over all the details of that, but, today,
let's go over the small aspect of that belief that was debunked this
week.
Catastrophism means
suddenness. The significance of the Beresovka mammoth to
catastophists is the idea that the perfection of its preservation was
due to its being frozen in a few hours--faster than any known means
of freezing. One line of thought using the Beresovka mammoth was
based on the supposedly non-arctic food found in its unflossed mouth.
The other is based on the quality of its meat. Twice now I've
mentioned that several recorded accounts, before 1901, mention dogs
eating the meat, but none mention humans eating it. So, did Herz or
Pfitzenmayer make this claim about their mammoth? No, they did not.
The origin appears to have
come from Herz' comment that the mammoth's flesh "looks as fresh
as well-frozen beef or horse meat." This has been taken to mean
it tasted like well-frozen beef or horse meat. It did not.
Pfitzenmayer wrote that they could smell it a mile away and that they
initially could only work on excavating it for a few minutes before
fleeing to get some fresh air. Though it's not mentioned in either of
their initial accounts. One of them did taste the meat.* One night,
toward the end of their work, they got drunk and began daring the
other to eat come of the meat. The dogs had shown that it wasn't
fatal to eat (see dogs and shit, above). Finally, fortified with a
lot of vodka and pepper, one of them was able to chew up a chunk of
mammoth, but not swallow it.
Before I adjudge this
story to be the origin of all mammoth feast stories, I want to
suggest the possibility of an undocumented oral tradition that also
fed into it. I'm an Alaskan. Many old, white Alaskans have a
grandfather, know someone who had a grandfather, or whose grandfather
knew someone who regularly ate frozen mammoth. The Seattle
catastophist Donald Patton wrote that "mammoth steaks have even
been featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks." None of these
stories has been documented as true. All of these stories date back
to the gold rush days. None of the Russians before then make that
claim, none of the Anglo-white guys since then make that claim, and
I've never met an Alaskan native that makes that claim. My opinion is
that all of these stories are based on sourdoughs (old white
Alaskans) BSing cheechakos (newcomers).
And now, after many
digressions and distractions, I've finally arrived at the great
mammoth feast. In 1920,
Martin Gardner published
A Journey to
the Earth's Interior, Or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? His book is the most mature development of the hollow earth theory.
The central idea of this theory is that the surface of the earth is a
bubble with an empty space inside. The earliest western development
of this idea was by Edmond Halley of comet fame. Various later
versions developed ideas of what was inside. Gardner watched the many
attempts during his life to reach the poles and decided it was not
possible because there were no poles. When explorers reached a
certain high latitude, they entered a hole that led to the interior
world. Gravity held people against the under side of the bubble and a
tiny sun balanced at the center made life possible there. When Edgar
Rice Burroughs wrote his Pellucidar based on the same idea, Gardner
wrote to him asking if he had anything to do with the books. I don't
know if Burroughs answered.
Gardner, for once, did not
need the biblical flood or any other type of catastrophe to put
frozen mammoths in the Arctic. Like most catastrophists, he believed
that mammoths were normal tropical elephants whose appearance in the
Arctic needed explanation. His solution was that they lived in the
eternal tropics of the inner world. Occasionally, however, they would
fall into rivers or off the northern coast, drown, have their bodies
carried through the polar hole, be deposited on the Siberian coast,
buried, and frozen there before they could decompose--obviously.
Gardner dedicated an
entire chapter to the mammoth and within that chapter, a subtitled
section to the mammoth feast. Gardner specifically says it was Herz
who held a banquet with meat from the Berezovka mammoth "and he
asked scientists in other parts of the world to contribute other
ancient foods--such as corn dug up from the ruins of Egyptian
cities." Later versions of the story have added that Tsar
Nicholas II was the guest of honor. Other versions of the feast
removed Herz from the story and made Guillaume Apollinaire, the
Italian/French poet, the guest of honor. Later, when asked about the
feast, Gardner would only vaguely say, it was in all the papers, look
it up yourselves.
This, Klondike tall tales,
and other rumors established the popular legend that, at some time,
there had been a feast or dinner of mammoth steaks. Thirty years
later, a newer version appeared: at some point, soon after WWII, the
Explorer's Club of New York featured mammoth steaks on the menu of
its annual dinner. Oddly, this story, with its exactness, has not
been repeated as often as Gardner's vague story. But there is some
truth to this story, the Explorer's Club is a real organization, it
is in New York, and it has a fancy dinner with exotic fare every
year. Despite this story having so many verifiable points, I have
never come across a catastrophist who looked onto it enough to verify
the fact of the mammoth steaks. But, academic rigor has never been a
feature of fringe thought; recycling is their primary feature. After
sixty-five years, someone has finally looked into this factoid.
Here is the story as
reconstructed by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis, Timothy J. Walsh, Eric
J. Sargis, and Adalgisa Caccone in
an article in
PLOS One. The famous
menu was the from the 1951 annual Explorers Club dinner, held in
January that year. The source of the popularization of the story is
an article in The Christian Science Monitor that appeared several
days later. The first point they make completely kills the legend.
The menu didn't say mammoth; it said Megatherium, which is an extinct
species of South American giant ground sloth that did not live in the
far north. Although this might disappoint catastrophists, in its way,
it is much more interesting. Megatherium remains are far rarer than
mammoths and, as it is not an Arctic species, well preserved soft
tissue would have been insanely rare. If only there was some way to
prove that.
There is. Paul Griswold
Howes, the curator of the Bruce Museum missed the dinner. Wendell
Phillips Dodge, the chairman of the club, was good enough to save a
piece of the Megatherium for Howes. Rather than eat the tasty bit,
Howes preserved it and added it to the museum's collections. Dodge
was rather--well--dodgy about the origin of the meat. Originally, he
claimed it came from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. If true, this
would have extended the range of the Megatherium by over 10,000
miles. He is also reported to have said he had discovered a formula
by which he could convert sea turtle meat into giant sloth meat. I
think we can assume that formula included a generous helping of
bullshit.
Spoiler: It's not mammoth meat (source)
Glass et al. have the
tools to go beyond merely determining that the meat was not mammoth.
They were able to determine what it really was. All they needed was
the sample that Howes stored at the Bruce Museum. Howes carefully
labeled the sample so it wasn't difficult to find. The meat had been
cooked and stored in isopropyl alcohol, but this didn't prevent them
from extracting DNA for identification. Unlike forensic crime dramas,
they weren't able to determine that it was a near-sighted,
left-handed, yellow sloth from a bad part of Davenport, Iowa.
However, they were able to determine that it wasn't a mammoth or any
kind of sloth. It was, in fact, a green sea turtle of a sub-species
native to the Pacific Ocean. They weren't able to narrow it down
further than that. The green sea turtle is now an endangered species.
In those days it was a favored species for making turtle soup, a
major factor in its becoming endangered.
Although it's easy to
dismiss the mammoth feast as so much fringe silliness, it has had a
very real effect on how the public perceives mammoths. The idea that
there is almost perfect mammoth tissue available in the Siberian
tundra is one of the drivers of the idea that each new discovery
might provide the necessary genetic material to clone a mammoth.
Hundreds of frozen mammals have been in the northern tundra. None of
them have provided decent DNA for cloning.
This isn't the end of the
story. In 1979 a prospector near Fairbanks uncovered the frozen
remains of a steppe bison. Rather than try to blast the thing clear,
he reported it to the University of Alaska and R. Dale Guthrie was
able to conduct a proper excavation of it. It is one of the best
preserved Pleistocene mammals ever recovered. It was brought to the
university and, along with being properly examined, the main parts of
the body were prepared for display in the museum. The chief
taxidermist, Erick Grandqvist, saved a piece of meat from the Bison's
neck. When his work was done, he Guthrie, and visiting
paleontologist, Björn Kurtén made a stew out of it. The meat was
tough, but edible.
