The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History

by Claudine Cohen, William Rodarmor (Translator)

Overview

From cave paintings to the latest Siberian finds, woolly mammoths have fascinated people across Europe, Asia, and North America for centuries. Remains of these enormous prehistoric animals were among the first fossils to be recognized as such, and they have played a crucial role in the birth and development of paleontology. In this lively, wide-ranging look at the fate of the mammoth, Claudine Cohen reanimates this large mammal with heavy curved tusks and shaggy brown hair through its history in science, myth, and popular culture.

Cohen uses the mammoth and the theories that naturalists constructed around it to illuminate wider issues in the history of science, showing how changing views about a single object reveal the development of scientific methods, practices, and ideas. How are fossils discovered, reconstructed, displayed, and interpreted? What stories are told about them, by whom, and how do these stories reflect the cultures and societies in which they are told?

To find out, Cohen takes us on a grand tour of the study of mammoth remains, from England, Germany, and France to Russia and America, and from the depths of Africa to the frozen frontiers of Alaska and Siberia, where intact mammoth corpses have been discovered in the permafrost. Along the way, she shows how paleontologists draw on myth and history, as well as on scientific evidence, to explore the deep history of the earth and of life. Cohen takes her history from the sixteenth century right up to the present, when researchers are using molecular biology to retrieve mammoth DNA, calling up dreams of cloning the mammoth and one day seeing herds of woolly mammoths roaming the frozen steppes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226112923
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/02/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Claudine Cohen teaches the history of science at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author or coauthor of La Genèse de Telliamed: Théorie de la terre et histoire naturelle à l'aube des Lumières; Boucher de Perthes: Les Origines romantiques de la préhistoire; and L'Homme des origines: Savoirs et fictions en préhistoire. She is currently writing a new book about women in prehistory and preparing (with André Wakefield) the first English edition of Leibniz's Protogaea.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface to the American Edition

Preface

Introduction

PART I: IMAGES

1The Mammoth Appears

PART II: MYTHS

2Saint Augustine and the Giants

3Leibniz's Unicorn

4Identifying an Elephant: The
Russian Mamont, the Elephant,
and the Flood

PART III: STORIES
5The "Vast Mahmout" and the Birth
of the American Nation

6The Mammoth and the "Revolutions
of the Surface of the Globe"

7The Mammoth in Victorian Times

8Of Mammoths and Men

9The Mammoth in the Trees

10From Africa to Alaska: The Travels
of the Mammoth

11Cloning the Mammoth? Elephants,
Computers, and Molecules

12Life and Death of Mammoths:
Scenarios for an Extinction

Conclusion: The Future of
Paleontology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Stephen Jay Gould

"Some groping attempts to tell the history of paleontology through a mammoth's eyes have been made before, but only as a lick and promise, and largely by amateur enthusiasts with (perhaps) adequate knowledge of fossils, but little understanding of the subtleties or larger contexts in the history of science. But, in this truly pathbreaking book, the mammoth has finally met its match in Claudine Cohen." --from the Foreword by Stephen Jay Gould

Editorial Reviews

In 413 A.D., Saint Augustine wrote of the discovery of an enormous tooth on the Mediterranean shore: "If it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it." He went on: "For though the bodies of ordinary men were larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature." Fossil relics, Claudine Cohen points out in The Fate of the Mommoth newly translated from the French by William Rodarmor, were not infrequently taken as evidence of a prehistoric, super-tall human race. Elephant bones in particular spurred the imagination -- the hollowed nasal cavity in the skull of the now-extinct dwarf elephant was thought to be the eye socket of a Cyclops; the mammoth's ivory tusk, the spiralled horn of a unicorn. The myths persisted for centuries; when Lewis and Clark headed west, Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that they would find a living woolly mammoth larger than those frozen in Europe, thus silencing the French naturalist Buffon, who wrote, "There is something in the New World that is contrary to Nature's growth."

In Time Traveler, Michael Novacek, the curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, describes his own experience in hunting fossils as a sort of paleo-hazing of the new kids on the dig. Novacek points out the disdain of younger paleontologists for tracking big-game skeletons, and he offers illustrations of selected ancient creatures such as the feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx and Smilodon californicus, the sabre-toothed tiger, slinking past the tar pits of Southern California. Novacek's adventures brought him close to his subjects: "I was lost in the rocks and lost in time."(Lauren Porcaro)

The New Yorker