In the three-hundred-fifty years since Europeans first
received reports of a mysterious creature in Siberia called the mammoth,
nothing has engendered more public fascination about them than the occasional
discovery of nearly intact, frozen carcasses with flesh still attached. At some
point in the nineteenth century, frozen mammoths became a staple of
catastrophist theories. As one of the usual suspects of those theories, frozen
mammoths have regularly been trotted out to prove that Atlantis was real, the Earth's
axis can suddenly change location, a planet-sized comet caused the plagues of
Egypt, or that Noah's global flood was real. Sometimes they prove all of the
above despite the fact that the believers date them thousands of years apart.
Three particular mammoths show up more often that all
of the others combined. The Adams mammoth, named for the person who excavated
it, was discovered in 1799 near the mouth of the Lena River. In 1806, Mikhail
Adams journeyed to the spot and recovered most of the skeleton and several
hundred pounds of skin and hair. This was the first nearly complete mammoth
recovered and scientifically described. It was the basis for all nineteenth
century ideas about what a mammoth looked like in life. I have given an entire
chapter to this mammoth in my book. The Berezovka mammoth, named after the
place where it was found in 1901, was also nearly complete. Since scientists
were able to get to it soon after its discovery, they were able to examine
muscles and remains of some of the internal organs. In between the Adams and
the Berezovka was the Benkendorf mammoth. In 1846 a surveying party, led by a
Lt. Benkendorf, discovered a complete mammoth exposed by a flood of the
Indigirka river. Before the mammoth was carried away, the party was able to
make some measurements and examine the contents of the mammoth's stomach. The
main difference between these three famous mammoths is that the Adams and
Berezovka mammoths are real, while the Benkendorf mammoth is a complete
fiction.
The fictitious nature of the story hasn't hurt its
popularity. In In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
Dr. Walt Brown cites the Benkendorf mammoth in to prove his version of the
Noachian flood. John Cogan, in The New Order of Man's History, cites the same
mammoth to prove his theory of Atlantis being sunk by a giant asteroid strike.
Robert W. Felix cites the Benkendorf mammoth in Not by Fire but by Ice to prove
his theory that magnetic pole reversals cause sudden and regular ice ages. In
Darwin's Mistake: Antediluvian Discoveries Prove Dinosaurs and Humans
Co-Existed, Hans J. Zillmer calls on the same mammoth to disprove both
evolution and modern geology.
It's easy to point and laugh at the creationists and
catastrophists for being suckered into believing that a fictional mammoth would
support their theories. Recycling anecdotes is a well-established tradition
among conspiracy theorists and other purveyors of forbidden knowledge.
Unfortunately, the Benkendorf mammoth has just as long a history of being cited
in textbooks, popular science writing, and even academic papers. Samuel Sharp's
1876 textbook Rudiments of Geology uses the Benkendorf mammoth as a source of
information about the appearance and diet of mammoths as do the authors of the
1902 edition of The Cambridge Natural History, H. H. Lamb's 1977 book Climate:
Present, Past and Future, and a 1983 Time-Life book, Ice Ages.
The story of Benkendorf's discovery originally
appeared in a fairly obscure 1859 German book of science for young people,
Kosmos für die Jugend by an author named Philipp Körber. Why has the Körber
story managed to survive so long? More than anything else, I believe three
elements have come together to turn Benkendorf's mammoth into a nearly
unstoppable zombie. First, the original story was well told, filled with many
plausible details, and included the solutions to some outstanding mysteries
about mammoths. Second, because of the verisimilitude and answers, the story
was adopted and retold in considerable detail by some very influential
scientists. Their credibility led to many retellings in both the popular and
scientific press. Finally, debunkings of the story have been weak, made by not
credible writers, or located in hard to find places.
Kosmos für die Jugend. Mammoths weren't the only prehistoric animals on Körber's book.
In Körber's book, Benkendorf is an exemplary
character, the son of a Baltic German schoolteacher, who dedicated himself to
studying the mathematical arts. While serving in the Russian army, he came to
the attention of his superiors who recommended him to the navy where, at the
age of twenty-five, he was attached to a surveying expedition along the
Siberian coast. Körber lets the young lieutenant tell the story in his own
words, supposedly as a letter to a relative in Germany who passed it on to the
author.
After a credible description of permafrost, a still
unnamed and mysterious phenomenon, he describes the setting. The year of his
expedition, 1846, had an unusually warm and early spring. Unseasonable rains
melted away the snow and cleared the rivers while tearing away river banks and flooding
the land. When the rains stopped, they could see that the Indigirka River was
free of ice. He was given charge of a steam launch and sent to explore the new
channels carved by the floods. "There it was," he writes," we
made a strange discovery."
Suddenly our jager, ever on the outlook, called
loudly, and pointed to a singular and unshapely object, which rose and sank
through the disturbed waters.
I had already remarked it, but not given it any
attention, considering it only driftwood. Now we all hastened to the spot on
the shore, had the boat drawn near, and waited until the mysterious thing
should again show itself. Our patience was tried, but at last a black,
horrible, giant-like mass was thrust out of the water, and we beheld a colossal
elephant's head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in the
water in an unearthly manner, as though seeking for something lost therein.
Breathless with astonishment, I beheld the monster hardly twelve feet from me,
with his half-open eyes yet showing the whites. It was still in good
preservation.
Körber's illustration of the Benkendorf mammoth. I haven't seen this illustration published anywhere except for Körber's book.
Benkendorf's crew secure the mammoth with ropes and
chains and try to pull it to the shore, but its rear feet are frozen to the
river bottom and they can't budge it. Refusing to give up, Benkendorf has them
tie the ropes to stakes driven into the riverbank and waits for the river to
excavate the mammoth for him. The next day, the Yakuti horsemen arrive and
Benkendorf puts them to work reeling in his catch.
Picture to yourself an elephant with the body
covered with thick fur, about thirteen feet in height and fifteen in length,
with tusks eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends, a stout
trunk of six feet in length, colossal limbs of one and a half feet in
thickness, and a tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty
hair. The animal was fat and well grown; death had overtaken him in the fulness
of his powers. His parchment-like, large, naked ears lay fearfully turned up
over the head; about the shoulders and the back he had stiff hair about a foot
in length, like a mane. The long outer hair was deep brown, and coarsely
rooted. The top of the head looked so wild, and so penetrated with pitch, that
it resembled the rind of an old oak tree. On the sides it was cleaner, and under
the outer hair there appeared everywhere a wool, very soft, warm, and thick,
and of a fallow-brown colour. The giant was well protected against the cold.
The whole appearance of the animal was fearfully strange and wild. It had not
the shape of our present elephants. As compared with our Indian elephants, its
head was rough, the brain-case low and narrow, but the trunk and mouth were
much larger. The teeth were very powerful. Our elephant is an awkward animal,
but compared with this Mammoth, it is as an Arabian steed to a coarse, ugly,
dray-horse. I could not divest myself of a feeling of fear as I approached the
head; the broken, widely-opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life, as
though it might move in a moment and destroy us with a roar....
The bad smell of the body warned us that it was
time to save of it what we could, and the swelling flood, too, bid us hasten.
First of all we cut off the tusks, and sent them to the cutter. Then the people
tried to hew off the head, but notwithstanding their good will, this work was
slow. As the belly of the animal was cut open the intestines rolled out, and
then the smell was so dreadful that I could not overcome my nauseousness, and
was obliged to turn away. But I had the stomach separated, and brought on one
side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The
principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones,
also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....
So intent are they in examining the mammoth that no
one notices the river slowly undermining the riverbank. Suddenly, the mammoth
is snatched from Benkendof's hands as the bank collapses taking the mammoth and
five of the horsemen with it. Sailors from the ship manage to rescue the horsemen,
but the mammoth is irretrievably lost.
Besides being a ripping good yarn, Körber's story had
a lot going for it. At the time, only one fairly intact mammoth had been
recovered and described in scientific literature. This was the Adams mammoth.
Adams was able to recover an almost complete skeleton, a large part of the
skin, and several bags of hair. However, most of the soft tissue had been eaten
by scavengers, the tusks had been cut off and sold, and the hair had shed from
the skin. This left the angle of the tusks and the distribution of the hair
open to speculation. With no internal organs present, Adams could provide no
information about what the mammoth ate. This was an area of great interest
since knowing its diet would be a major clue about the past climate of the
Arctic coast. Adams' account of recovering the mammoth was published and
republished in several languages over a decade. Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius
reassembled the skeleton and published a detailed description of it along with
large illustrations. Adams' and Tilesius' papers were the basis for all mammoth
studies in the nineteenth century. Körber's description of Benkendorf's mammoth
stuck closely to their descriptions, even where they made incorrect guesses.
Körber describes the tusks as "eight feet long,
thick, and curving outward at their ends." This follows Tilesius' attempt
at reconstructing the placement of the tusks on the Adams' mammoth. The
original tusks had been cut off and sold before Adams reached the mammoth (in
fact, it was the ivory merchant who reported the find). Adams bought a pair of
tusks on his way back from the coast which the merchant claimed were the
originals from his skeleton. These tusks were, in fact, from a younger, smaller
mammoth. Tilesius could only guess at their placement and put them on the wrong
sides of the skull with the points curving out and back over the mammoth's
shoulders. In part, because of Tilesius' incorrect guess and Körber's
confirmation of it, the correct placement of the tusks would still be a topic
of debate into the first decade of the twentieth century.
Tilesius' incorrect tusk placement confirmed by Körber.
The idea that the hair on the mammoth should be in the
form of a mane, rather than equally distributed about the body, comes from
Adams. Adams described the mammoth, when he first viewed it, as having "a
long mane on the neck." By the time Adams reached St. Petersburg, all of
the hair had fallen off of the skin. Since Adams says most of the hair had
fallen off by the time he reached the mammoth, it might be that the only hair
he saw still attached was around the neck and shoulders. In any case, this was
another incorrect assumption that gained support from Körber's tale.
Körber provided two other details about the mammoth's
appearance that were pure speculation and that turned out to be incorrect. The
"tail naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair"
is a nice detail that goes along with the lion-like mane. On Adams' mammoth,
the tail had been carried off by scavengers; its appearance was anybody's
guess. The "parchment-like, large, naked ears" are a convincing
detail that make his mammoth more elephant-like, specifically like an African
elephant, but badly suited to the Arctic. When Adams began excavating his
mammoth, most of the flesh and the skin of the head had been eaten by
scavengers. However, one side of the head was still buried and had preserved
its skin and ear. Adams mentioned only that ear was "furnished with a tuft
of fur." By the time the skin reached St. Petersburg, the ear had dried
out and was too damaged for Tilesius to draw any conclusions about its original
appearance.
While all of these external details were corrected by
the early years of the twentieth century, Körber's imaginative description of
the contents of the mammoth's stomach is a important bit of misinformation that
persisted almost to this day.
I had the stomach separated, and brought on one
side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The
principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones,
also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass....
We can be fairly certain that Körber didn't set out to
fool the scientific community. His book was intended for young people with an
interest in science. Unfortunately, this one detail, taken as a scientific
observation, had consequences in several fields. At the time, discovering what
the mammoth ate was considered the most important evidence as to the
environment in which it lived. Naturalists were divided between those who
thought elephants in the Arctic meant Siberia had had a warm climate in the
recent past, and those who thought mammoths were adapted to the cold, meaning
Siberia's cold climate had never changed. The answer to that question had great
implications for understanding the nature of the mammoth, the nature of the ice
ages (still a new idea), and whether or not geological and climatological
conditions changed gradually or catastrophically.
As with the physical appearance of the mammoth,
Körber's speculation about the diet of the mammoth was based on solid science.
In one of the earliest attempts at debunking the Benkendorf story, Johann
Friedrich von Brandt pointed out that the description of the mammoth's diet
accorded very closely with his own research into woolly rhinoceroses. He went
on, rather testily, to accuse Körber with stealing his ideas on how mammoths
and rhinoceroses came to be frozen in Siberia. Ten years before Körber's book
came out, Brandt had published an extensive review of woolly rhino remains in
the Russian imperial collection and previous studies on them. Brandt had
examined the head of the first frozen woolly rhino discovered and observed:
I have been so fortunate as to extract from
cavities in the molar teeth of the Wiljui rhinoceros a small quantity of its
half-chewed food, among which fragments of pine leaves, one-half of the seed of
a polygonaceous plant, and very minute portions of wood with porous cells (or
small fragments of coniferous wood), were still recognizable.
It is very likely that Körber was aware of Brandt's
work. Brandt's first observations were published as a letter in the journal of
the Royal Prussian Academy in 1846 in German, Körber's native language. His
complete paper was published in the journal of the Russian academy. It was also
reported in one of the most influential geology books of the century, Sir
Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, from the 1853 edition forward.
Besides Brandt, Körber had another source available to
him. In 1805, a mastodon skeleton was discovered in Virginia by workmen digging
a well. Word of the discovery made it to Bishop James Madison. In a letter to
Benjamin Smith Barton, Madison described the most important part of the
discovery:
It is now no longer a question, whether the [mastodon]
was a herbivorous or carnivorous animal. Human industry has revealed a secret,
which the bosom of the earth had, in vain, attempted to conceal. In digging a
well, near a Salt-Lick, in Wythe-county, Virginia, after penetrating about five
feet and a half from the surface, the labourers struck upon the stomach of a
mammoth. The contents were in a state of perfect preservation, consisting of
half masticated reeds, twigs, and grass, or leaves. There could be no
deception; the substances were designated by obvious characters, which could
not be mistaken, and of which every one could judge; besides, the bones of the
animal lay around, and added a silent, but sure, confirmation.
Barton was an influential scientist in his own right
and the publisher of the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Barton not
only published Bishop Madison's letter, he forwarded it to Baron Georges Cuvier
who quoted it in his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes. Like
Lyell's Geology, Recherches was an enormously influential book that went
through numerous editions. Even before the first edition of Recherches was
published, American readers knew that the story was wrong. In 1809, Madison
wrote to several of the American journals that had published his letter to say
that his sources had exaggerated. It was true that the vegetable matter was
found inside the skeleton of the mastodon, but it was no different from the
vegetable matter in the soil surrounding the skeleton. Unfortunately, no one
thought to tell Cuvier and the misinformation was repeated in every edition of
Recherches.
The story of the Benkendorf mammoth made it into
academic and popular science literature in the early 1860s, just a few years
after the publication of Körber's book. By the end of the century, some of the
details were so well established that they had could stand up against newer,
and more correct, data. A mammoth well enough preserved that it still had its
stomach matter intact wasn't discovered until 1901 when the Berezovka mammoth
was found. Otto Herz recovered thirty-five pounds of plant matter from the
mammoth's stomach and mouth, which turned out to be meadow grasses and not
conifers. This is an important distinction. Although elephants can eat almost
any plant matter, their teeth and guts are specialized as grazers—eaters of
grasses and ground plants--not browsers--eaters of branches and leaves—like
mastodons and woolly rhinos. This is a huge distinction in defining what
mammoths were and what their environment was.
Because the Benkendorf story had so much prestige by
the beginning of the twentieth century, it was almost unchallengeable. When the
final analysis of the gut material recovered by Herz was published in 1914, the
author of the study, V. N. Sukachev, even before describing the grasses and
flowering herbs in its gut, almost apologetically wrote that his conclusions
gave "no particular reasons for distrusting Benkendorf's testimony."
The two diets continued side by side almost to the end of the twentieth century
creating confusion about the nature of the mammoth's habitat.
How is it that the educated guesses in a children's
science book gained such credibility? For that, the responsibility lies with
two prestigious scientists who reprinted Körber's tale and by the weakness of the
efforts to debunk it.
On 26 November 1842, twenty-seven year old Alexander
von Middendorff left St. Petersburg for Siberia. Middendorff had been hired by
the Academy of Sciences to investigate the phenomena of permafrost and conduct
a survey of the flora and fauna of the Taymyr Peninsula. His tiny expedition
included three other scientists, four Cossacks, and a Nenets interpreter. The
expedition was brutal—Middendorff suffered freezing, starving, and severe
depression—but ultimately was successful. Before returning to St. Petersburg,
Middendorff mounted a second expedition to the Sea of Okhotsk and ascended the
Amur River. Leaving one of his companions behind to continue gathering data in
Yakutsk, he returned to the capital in 1845 as something of a scientific
celebrity.
Alexander von Middendorff spent his entire life documenting everything he knew about Siberia. Was he too complete?
Middendorff's letters from the field were published in
the journal of the Academy and a short report was written based on the letters.
The Emperor found the report quite interesting and gave all of the scientists
medals and pensions. There is no word whether the Cossacks or the interpreter
received any reward for their parts. Middendorff then settled down to write the
formal analysis of the data they had gathered. It took him thirty years. I'm
sure any graduate student will empathize.
Middendorff found the remains of a mammoth while he
was on the Taymyr Peninsula and almost died getting back. Immediately upon
returning to St. Petersburg, he began to collect information about other
discoveries of mammoth carcasses. Lyell included some information from Middendorff
in the 1847 edition of his Geology. Middendorff wrote a long article on
mammoths in 1860 as a warm up to his official report on his own find. This
report appeared in 1867. Along with the details of his own find, Middendorff
included an historical survey of previous finds which included the entire
Benkendorf letter. This is the ultimate source of the transition of Körber's
tale from the realm of educational fiction into the realm of fact.
It appears to me that Körber's tale came to
Middendoff's attention because of Brandt's debunking of it. Middendorff and
Brandt were colleagues and friends. At the same time Middendorff was writing
the volume of his researches that included his mammoth, Brandt published, in a
popular Russian magazine, an article on mammoths that concluded with his
debunking of Körber. Brandt was quite emphatic in his rejection of the
Benkendorf story: "[T]he whole story of Benkendorf is pure lie and
invention. The expedition to the Indigirka never took place and could not take
place because of the impenetrable masses of ice of the Arctic Ocean; Benkendorf
is a work of imagination."
If Middendorff learned of Körber's tale from Brandt,
he should also have known of Brandt's objections. For Middendorff, the most
telling evidence of the story's fictitious nature should have been the sheer
magnitude of Benkendorf's expedition. Middendorff's expedition to the Taymyr
was made up of a mere four scientists, four Cossacks, and an interpreter. The
idea that a fully crewed frigate with two steam cutters could have been rounded
the peninsula a mere three years later must have sounded to Middendorff like
fiction, and bad fiction at that. When Middendorff copied the Benkendorf letter
into his report, he added a warning to his readers that they shouldn't put too
much faith in the account:
Since we know the birthday of the enterprising
countryman of mine to whom we owe this extraordinary discovery, because we have
before us his life's story and the story of his expedition down to the minor
details, there would seem to be no doubt about this wonderful discovery. The
real and invented are so cheekily woven together here that it is worthy of a
place along side la Martiniere's fantasy of Novaya Zemlya [a famous seventeenth
century hoax] that persisted for so long. But I do not deprive my readers of
the pleasure of reading this.
This is far from Brandt's uncompromising rejection of
the story. Middendorff went further in qualifying his rejection. Following the
account, he wrote:
We can only hope that at some time in the future
the author will publish this episode himself and describe many other adventures
and occurrences experiences seen by him during his travels in Siberia. We are
happy that at least a small grain from his rich store of information has come
down to us.
Middendorff implies that he thought that the
Benkendorf letter, as published, was a generously embellished account of a real
discovery though he, of all people, was in a position to have known better.
Regardless of what he may have thought, such nuance and his various caveats
were completely missed by later authors. Although Middendorff started out as an
unknown teacher on a small research expedition, the quality of the monographs
based on his research made him a well-respected authority within a very short
time after his return. Scientists all over Europe and the Americas eagerly
awaited new papers and carefully studied each one, though, in this case, not as
carefully as they should have.
Middendorff's reports were published in German and
have never been translated into English except in fragments used by English
speaking scientists in their own works. William Boyd Dawkins was one of those
scientists and the person most responsible for introducing Benkendorf to the
English-speaking world and for lending credibility to the story. Dawkins was an
influential British geologist who became involved in debates over the antiquity
of man, labor rights, and the channel tunnel. It was the first of those that
got him interested in mammoths.
William Boyd Dawkins.
In 1868, within a few months of Middendorff's
monograph on mammoths being published, Dawkins referred to it in an article
entitled "On the Range of the Mammoth" published in Popular Science
Review. Dawkins included almost the entire text of the Benkendorf letter (in
his own translation). He introduced the letter with "The fourth and by far
the most important discovery of a body is described by an eye-witness of its
resurrection; so valuable in its bearings that we translate it at some
length." Dawkins went on to emphasize the importance of the apocryphal
stomach contents:
This most graphic account affords a key for the
solution of several problems hitherto unknown. It is clear that the animal must
have been buried where it died, and that it was not transported from any place
further up stream, to the south, where the climate is comparatively temperate.
The presence of fir in the stomach proves that it fed on the vegetation which
is now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low, desolate,
treeless, moss-covered tundra, in which the body lay buried—a fact that would
necessarily involve the conclusion that the climate of Siberia, in those
ancient days, differed but slightly from that of the present time. Before this
discovery the food of the Mammoth had not been known by direct evidence.
For the English-speaking world, this was the moment
that the genie escaped the bottle. Dawkins either didn't notice Middendorff's
qualifications or didn't understand their significance. Because Dawkins was a
scientist of some prominence, other scientists and writers felt safe in
following his lead. During the last part of the nineteenth century, dozens of
writers made reference to the Benkendorf mammoth on Dawkins' authority.
After 1868, the story of the Benkendorf mammoth took
off with a roar while attempts to debunk it, or even to make qualifications, as
Middendorff did, gained no traction whatsoever. Brandt's debunking was
published in a Russian language popular magazine and went almost entirely
unnoticed. It was mentioned in 1867 in the Bulletin de la Société impériale des
naturalistes de Moscou by Alexander Brandt, who wanted to assure his readers
that there was no feud between Middendorff and Johann Brandt, and again in 1958
by B. A. Tikhomirov. I know of no other reference to Brandt's debunking during
the intervening ninety-one years. Neither Middendorf nor Brandt made any
further efforts to correct the misinformation being spread.
There was nothing extraordinary about the paper on
mammoth extinction that Henry H. Howorth read at the 1869 meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. Howarth reviewed the
unanswered questions about the mammoth and its environment, and proposed a
catastrophic flood to account for both their extinction and the ice age (it was
a common belief, at the time, that the mammoths went extinct before the ice
age, not after). Howarth's flood theory was well within the mainstream of
British geological thought at the time. Over the next decade he established
himself as a solid figure in politics and as an historian. In the early 1880s,
however, he began to develop his flood ideas in a series of articles published
in Geological Magazine. In these, he took a more strident tone and denounced
the uniformist orthodoxy of the geological community and what he called
"the extreme Glacial views of [Louis] Agassiz." In 1887, he organized
his ideas into a book, The Mammoth and the Flood. Two other books on his
catastrophic ideas followed.
Howorth did not believe the Benkendorf story. In the
first of his articles of the 1880s, Howorth revealed that he was familiar with
several pieces that referenced Benkendorf, but he ignored the story. In fact,
he went so far as to say, "I am not aware that the contents of the stomach
of any Siberian Mammoth have been hitherto examined." In an article in
1882, Howorth directly took on Benkendorf:
This notice has always seemed to me to be most
suspicious. ... I confess my suspicions were not allayed when I found
[Middendorff] had obtained it ... from a boy's book. ... It is very strange
that if genuine no accounts of this discovery should have reached the ears of
Baer or Brandt, Schmidt or Schrenck, who none of them mention it, and that it
should be first heard of in a popular book for boys in [1859].
Perhaps the most important, and thus frustrating,
semi-debunking of Körber's story came in 1929. I. A. Tolmachoff's
"Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros in Siberia" is a classic of
mammoth paleontology. In it, Tolmachoff described all of the finds of mammoths
with flesh still attached up to that date. His count of thirty-nine is still
sometimes repeated, as is his map of their locations. My research brings the
count up to about seventy-five after deducting the four rhinoceroses in his
original count. Tolmachoff tells the story in detail, but is firm in his
rejection of it, saying "Howorth quite correctly considers it a fiction.
... Such an expedition never took place to this part of Siberia. The first
steamer arrived to the Lena River only... in 1881." As often as Tolmachoff
has been read and cited, no one seems to have read beyond his first telling of
the story to catch is rejection of it.
The Russian scientist B.A. Tikhomirov tried to deal
with both the diet of misinformation and the Benkendorf story in an article
that was published in Russian in 1958 and in English in 1961. The title
"The Expedition That Never Was—Benkendorf's Expedition to the River
Indigirka" should be all that most people need to see to get the point.
Unfortunately, most people didn't see it. He was partly motivated by guilt. He
had cited the Benkendorf letter in an earlier paper and later discovered his
error by reading a paper by Brandt on the history of mammoth discoveries to 1866
with an unqualified rejection of the story. Following this revelation,
Tikhomirov went to the naval archives to confirm that Benkendorf's expedition
never happened. That there is no permission or budget recorded for it should
have provided the most definitive debunking possible for anyone familiar with
the Russian bureaucracy of the time (or an any bureaucracy of any country, for
that matter).
Tikhomirov's paper arrived at what should have been a
great time to influence catastrophist narratives and their use of the frozen
mammoth. The fifties had begun to produce a bumper crop of catastrophists
citing frozen mammoths as proof of their theories. The greatest of these was
Immanuel Velikovsky, whose pinballing planets theory jammed all post ice age
history together into a couple thousand years in order to prove the Old
Testament. Charles Hapgood wanted the earth's crust to periodically, abruptly
change location with relation to the poles. Otto Muck though he could explain
the end of Atlantis by the strike of giant comet. The role of mammoths in these
ideas was that they should have lived in temperate forests, as Benkendorf's
diet indicated, and then been thrust into the Arctic and frozen according to
their preferred catastrophe.
But, the year before Tikhomirov's paper appeared in a
scientific journal, a much more sensationalist article appeared in the American
popular press. Ivan T. Sanderson was a popular nature writer whose father had
been killed by an angry rhinoceros (a detail that has nothing to do with this
story). During the fifties, his focus gradually moved from topics like a nice
book on elephants to serious endorsement of abominable snowmen. In 1960, he
wrote an article that influences catastrophist narratives about mammoths to
this day: “Riddle of the Frozen Mammoths.”
I'll leave Benkendorf here. In my next post. I want to
say a few words about Sanderson's article and one of his most infamous sources.
