Discovering the Mastodon:
Part 1: First Reports
mastodon molar
(after Blumenback, 1799)
The earliest European reports of the mastodon followed the 1705 discovery of a fist-sized tooth and bone fragments near the village of Claverack in the Hudson River valley of Colonial New York. Accounts by two Puritan clergymen, Edward Taylor and Cotton Mather, popularized the discovery and attributed the remains to a race of giants destroyed during the Biblical Flood. Mather also wrote to the Royal Society in London on the "Giant of Claverack" and the tooth made its way into the Society's collection of curiosities.
Giants were popular in the folklore of many cultures. Indeed, Edward Taylor invoked Native American legends of human giants in his account of the "Giant of Claverack." They were also prominent in the two pillars of Western Civilization: the Classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, and the teachings of the Church. For instance, many ancient Romans and Hellenistic Greeks believed that gigantic Cyclops were the first inhabitants of Sicily. Accounts of giants can also be found in the works of Virgil, Pliny and Homer. Christian references to giants extended from its early years to well into the 18th century. For example, Saint Augustine described a gigantic "human" molar and wrote of an antediluvian race of long-lived giants in his 413 A.D. masterwork, The City of God. In 1665, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher provided a compilation of giant accounts. He criticized some accounts that he believed exaggerated their size, but never called into question their existence.
Next: Part 2 - Enter the French
Print Resources:
- Blumenbach, Johan Friedrich. 1799. Handbuch fur Naturgeschichte. Gottingen. Translated by R.T. Gore as: A Manual on the Elements of Natural History. London: 1825.
- Cohen, C. 2002. The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myths and History. Translated by William Rodarmor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Le Destin du Mammouth. 1994. Editions du Seuil.
- Semonin, P. 2002. American Monster: How the nation's first prehistoric creature became a symbol of national identity. New York & London: New York University Press.