Mammoth

“ I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists. Our explorers--"
At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A weakly breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what you may know of the mammoth and his ways." ”

“ How primeval man, with his inferior weapons, slew the Mammoth is not easy to understand; but that they were contemporaneous is clearly shown by associated remains, and by the notorious sketch of the Mammoth on a piece of its own ivory, in which curved tusks and a forehead like that of an Indian Elephant are plainly to be seen. ”

“ Âge du Mammoth.—The principal relics associated with the mammoth were spear-points, a doll-like object of reindeer horn (suggesting an attempt at modelling the human form) , a few articles showing efforts of rudimentary carving, and a bâton de commandement, also ornamented. These objects were found to be lowest in the cave débris and coeval with the time when the swollen rivers occasionally overflowed into the caves and left stratified beds of gravel or mud on their floors. ”

“ But it would be an artist's proof with the lights and shades reversed, the lines that sketch the form of the mammoth would be white and the body dark, yet for all that lifelike, since the undulating indentations that represent the woolly hide of the immense creature would relieve the ground. ”

“ Remember the mammoths have all been dead for thousands of years. (Elephant, Mammoth, Siberia.)
What is there about the climate of Siberia that made this strange thing possible?
How did the mammoth get his name? Was it because he was so big—such a "mammoth" creature? [9]
[9] Mammoth, you will find, comes from a word meaning "earth." It didn't mean "big" at all at first. One of the most lovable traits of a good dictionary, I think, is that it tells so many interesting little stories like that about the early life of words ”

“ I may remark here that all the known interments of the mammoth age indicate a race of men of great cerebral capacity, with long heads and coarsely marked features, of large stature and muscular vigor, surpassing indeed much in all these respects the average man of modern Europe. These characteristics befit men who had to contend with the mammoth and his contemporaries, and to subdue the then vast wildernesses of the eastern continent, and they correspond with the Biblical characteristics of antediluvian man. ”

“ It was strange that whenever they came upon a mammoth imbedded in a cliff, it was always dead. It must be a creature unable to bear the air or the light, and when in the course of its subterranean wanderings it breaks through to the outer air it dies immediately. With so much knowledge of the natural history of the creature to start from, other details grow round it in the usual way. Yakuts and Tunguz have seen the earth heave and sink, as a mammoth walked beneath. ”

“ In Europe, the fact that the mammoth survived into the human period was proved some years ago by the discovery of human stone implements associated with mammoth bones in the river gravels of the Somme Valley, France, and in the Virgin Cave at Brixham, South [Pg 11] Devon, England; but more interesting still, was the discovery of prehistoric carvings of the great elephant, sketches from nature made by the "cave-men," and found in their subterranean dwellings along the river Dordogne in France, illustrations of which will be given in the following pages. ”

“ Nothing but the mammoth itself, surviving into comparatively recent times and encountered by the Indians, could suffice to account for the carving, and we can no longer suppose that the size and unusual appearance of the mammoth bones seen by the Indians in Kentucky could alone have originated the traditions.
In the carving, we have the most interesting mammoth picture in existence ”

“ Lesson XXXIII. The capture of such a large animal as the mammoth was the occasion for calling all of the people who were represented in the capture of it to the spot for a feast. The tusks at this time were prized as trophies; later they were used in the manufacture of tools and weapons. The examination of a mammoth’s skeleton will convince one that the tusks were not removed without many hard blows. An idea of the size of the head may be gained from the fact that a single tooth weighed seventeen pounds. ”

“ It is, perhaps, one of the most marvellous facts in the whole realm of nature that the body of a mammoth should be preserved exactly as it existed in life thousands and thousands of years ago, but there is every reason to believe that this happened in countless cases. ”

“ We invite special attention to more perfect and more characteristic works, in which, as Carl Vogt remarks, the spirit of observation and imitation of Nature, especially of living Nature, is remarkably manifest. The figure of the mammoth attracts our notice at once. A drawing found in the cavern of La Magdelaine, in the Dordogne, engraved on a tablet of mammoth bone, is marked by the strikingly clumsy attitude of the unwieldy body of the animal, by its long hair, the form of its lofty skull with concave front, and its enormous recurved tusks. ”

“ It is unquestionably a picture of a combat between savages and the hairy mammoth—an encounter such as our imagination has not yet connected with the ancient forests of America, and drawn as well as an Indian who had seen the great monster could have drawn it. ”

“ And the coexistence of man with the animals whose bones accompanied his relics was proved by unquestionable evidence, for drawings and carved forms of these animals were found, proving incontestably that man had gazed upon their living forms. Thus the sketch of a mammoth, showing the long hair which served to protect this animal from the cold, was found engraved upon a piece of mammoth ivory, and one of a group of reindeer on a piece of reindeer horn. ”

“ At Předmost, near the site of the human burial described above, there has been discovered a statuette of the mammoth sculptured in the round, in ivory, which proves that animal sculpture was well advanced in Solutrean times. The statuette was found six to nine feet beneath the surface of the 'loess,' in an undoubted Solutrean layer. The accompanying fauna is of a truly arctic character: the mammoth being extraordinarily abundant; the tundra forms including the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, musk-ox, reindeer, arctic fox, arctic hare, glutton, and banded lemming ”

“ This ivory sculpture of the mammoth indicates very accurately the characteristic contours of the top of the head, and of the back; the striations on the side represent the falling masses of hair. Other sculptured figures representing the mammoth are believed to be of Magdalenian age, the best known being the figures found in the grottos of Bruniquel and Laugerie Basse, [Pg 349] a fragment from Raymonden, Dordogne, and a bas-relief in the grotto of Figuier, Gard. ”

“ A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and I had him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend, pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times before I knocked off for supper. Don't you see? A race-course! A man and a mammoth! ”

“ I cannot help suspecting that many tusks and teeth of the mammoth, said to have been found in peat, may be as spurious as are the horns of the rhinoceros cited more than once in the "Memoirs of the Wernerian Society" as having been obtained from shell-marl in Forfarshire and other Scotch counties; yet, between the period when the mammoth was most abundant and that when it died out, there must have elapsed a long interval of ages when it was growing more and more scarce ”

“ The view of the European origin of the mammoth especially is open to very serious objections. It does not occur in any European pliocene deposits, and could not therefore have originated in our Continent until pleistocene times. That it should then have commenced its travels through Europe and Siberia to the New Siberian Islands and North America seems almost an impossibility. But if we suppose the mammoth to have had its home in India in pliocene times, it could then easily have migrated to all the parts of the world where its remains have been discovered. ”

“ Arthur, with his usual curiosity, wanted to be told "all about it," and I with my usual desire to teach the searcher after knowledge even of little things—though a mammoth is scarcely a "little thing"—briefly gave him some insight of the subject, running over the differences between the mastodontine and the elephantine mammoth; and then remarked to him, incidentally, that an American mastodon giganteus, found not far from where we stood, over in Missouri, a third of a century before, was now in our British Museum, where I had seen it. ”

“ I feel it and yet work I will, and may God grant me life to see the last plate of my mammoth work finished. ”

“ The presence of the mammoth, one of the mammals of the Tertiary epoch, long ages ago quite extinct, known to have been clothed with a warm coat of shaggy hair and wool, is evidence at once of the great antiquity of the age in whose broken monuments we are able to read fragments of a witching history, and of the prevalence of a far more severe climate at that period than that which the southern countries of Europe enjoy now. ”

“ Fig. 64.—Sketch of a Mammoth, graven on a Slab of Ivory. The second figure is an entire mammoth, graven on a fragment of reindeer horn, from the rock-shelters of Bruniquel, and belongs to M. Peccadeau de l'Isle. This figure forms the hilt of a poniard, the blade of which springs from the front part of the animal. It may be recognised to be the mammoth by its trunk, its wide flat feet, and especially by its erect tail, ending in a bunch of hair. In point of fact, the present species of elephant never sets up the tail, and has no bunch of hair at the end of it. ”

“ Professor Owen, the eminent paleontologist, writes: “The mammoth is better known than most extinct animals by reason of the discovery of an entire specimen preserved in the frozen soil of a cliff at the mouth of the river Lena in Siberia. ”

“ But his vast weight and power ploughed the first paths through the swamps and forests. The paths made by the mammoth through unexplored tracts were a great boon to half-savage man. In fact, man followed along those paths after awhile and learned how to kill the mammoth very neatly. ”

“ The Mammoth finds no favor there. But it is not from it that I flee, nor snow nor the frost which thickens the waters and makes all trees look like dead sticks. It is because of the ice-mountains that have sealed every drinking hole and food patch. I must eat and drink to live and as Death is my last choice, I made haste to seek this land of plenty—and friends. ”

“ The mammoth was a gigantic species of extinct elephant. It flourished in past geological ages, and also survived into the days of early man. When the Palæolithic or Old Stone man flourished on earth two hundred thousand years ago, the mammoth was as common as the horse to-day. In no part of the world were mammoths more abundant than in Northern Siberia. ”

“ The mammoth (which agreed with the Indian elephant in the number of ridges on its grinders and in other points) lived in quite cold, sub-Arctic conditions, at a time when glaciers completely covered Scandinavia and the north of our islands as well as most of Germany. It retained a complete coat of coarse hair throughout life. The young of our surviving elephants only exhibit transitorily the family tendency.
The last mammoth probably disappeared from the area which is now Great Britain about 150,000 years ago. ”

“ The prodigious Mammoth, whose enormous bones I have often viewed with astonishment, and which were at least six times bigger than those of the largest elephant, exists no longer; although its remains have been found in Ireland, Siberia, Louisiana, and other places remote from each other. Of all species of quadrupeds this was certainly the largest and strongest, and since it has disappeared, how many smaller, weaker, and less remarkable, must have perished, without having left any evidence of their past existence? ”

“ Inasmuch as bones and tusks of the mammoth are dug up in enormous quantities over tracts now almost bare of trees, and scanty as to other vegetation, certain naturalists have assumed that in times coeval with mammoth or mastodonic life the vegetation of these regions must have been richer than now, otherwise how could such troops of enormous beasts have gained their sustenance? ”

“ Another fact, upon which M. Dupont has with justice insisted, adds to the probability arising from various considerations, of our being right in attributing to these quaternary men a kind of religion more or less analogous to Fetishism. In the Trou de Chaleux, a mammoth’s ulna was placed by the side of a hearth upon a slab of sandstone. Now the mammoth no longer existed in Belgium at the close of the age of the reindeer, and this bone must have been found in the alluvium of the preceding age. ”

“ Drift deposits. Nay, more, a picture of a mammoth has been found engraved upon a piece of mammoth-tusk. The engraving on page 349 represents this most curious work of art.
The man who carved this must have seen the creature it represented; and, as the mammoth did not survive the Drift, that man must have lived before or during the Drift. And he was no savage. Says Sir John Lubbock:
"No representation, however rude, of any animal has yet been found in any of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Stone-Age lake-villages. ”

“ Once more the patriarch uncovered his face and gazed in awe at the Mammoth-head and its human rider.
“What trickery can we poor cave-folk offer to the Man Mammoth who sees and knows all? We but humble ourselves that he may shine upon us and cease to ravage the land with flood and flame.”
“Agh-h,” grunted Pic. He smiled and his eyes twinkled. Now he understood. The Cave-men mistook him for a god because he rode upon the Mammoth’s neck. To them, he and the Elephant were one; part man, part beast—the Man Mammoth, ruler of the sky whose smile was sunshine ”