My answer to a Quora question:

History is a useful narrative constructed from what we know about the past. Let me unpack that bit by bit.

"History is a ... narrative..." History is not an accurate reproduction of the past and it is not all of the facts. History is a story (as the word indicates). We know he names and home towns all of the soldiers involved in D-Day. We know what many of them ate that day. We know the technical specs of their weapons, who designed, and who manufactured them. We know the logistics of getting them to the beach, the support efforts, and the casualties. To wrote a history of that day, the historian has to pick and choose through all of the raw data--the facts--to decide what is necessary to tell the story they want to tell.

"History is ... useful..." No historian is completely random in picking their narrative. Again, look at military history. A narrative based on the same data/facts might describe a glorious victory, a unredeemed tragedy, or illustrate some aspect of the human condition. Facts and interpretation are two different things. This is why conservatives get so upset about how history is taught in the schools. Each new generation of historians reinterprets the same facts in the light of their experiences. Conservatives want history to be carved in stone. Facts are facts. History isn't facts; history is interpretation of facts.

"History is ... constructed from what we know..." We can't know everything. This is obvious in the far past where we take every tiny data point and try to squeeze as much information as we can from it. Every decade or so we have an earthshaking discovery in ancient history. Here is a city that dominated this trade route for three centuries and this changes everything we thought we knew about the cities on either end of that trade route. Even in something as information rich as the D-Day example, there is an enormous amount we don't know. What were the conversations that led to important decisions. Who knew what and when did they now it.

It's an historian's cliche to refer to history as a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, and no box to show us what the picture should look like, and no edge pieces, and a few handfuls of pieces from other puzzles added, and a hyperactive cat in the house, and half the pieces are wet... and that's why we love it.

A tale of two skulls

In early December 1695, a group of workmen were excavating some fine white sand from a quarry between the villages of Burgtonna and Gräfentonna, in Thuringia. The sand was valuable in a number of crafts, including filling hourglasses, so the workers were careful in their excavations. You probably know what happened next. They uncovered “some awful big bones” and sent word to the castle to find out what to do with them. Luckily for us, the lord of the land, Duke Fredrick II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was an enlightened despot who was both a patron of the arts and sciences and an avid collector. More than simply ordering the workmen to save the bones for his collections, he had them leave the bones in place and slowly uncover them. This modern style excavation would be an under-appreciated milestone in the development of paleontology.

What the diggers discovered that day were a pair of feet and lower legs pointing northward. The feet had five toes and short ankle bones. The spectators thought they looked more like human feet than any animal they knew. At that point, the weather turned nasty and the excavation was halted until after the new year. In January, the work resumed. Over a period of about two weeks, they uncovered the upper legs, pelvis, a complete vertebral column with ribs, the upper limbs with five digit hands or feet, and... a “hideous head” unlike anything anyone had ever seen. To one side of the top of the skull were two enormous, curved pieces of what appeared to be ivory. With the entire skeleton nicely uncovered, the Duke made a special trip from Gotha on January 23 to view it, bringing along a large retinue that included a number of doctors from the university and his personal librarian.

The doctors, led by Johann Christoph Schnetter, and the librarian, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, all had a good laugh over the silly peasants who had thought the bones were those of a giant. Although that would have been preferred explanation of many educated men earlier in the century, very few still believed that there had ever been giants other than the few individuals named in the Bible. While the doctors and Tentzel agreed on what the bones were not, they passionately disagreed about what they were. Schnetter and the doctors believed they were the natural formations that merely looked like bones while Tentzel believed that they were the remains of a real elephant. Duke Fredrick chose not to take sides. He ordered the doctors and Tentzel to each submit a brief summarizing their arguments.

Today, most people would look at the bones and say "any idiot can see that those are fossils of some kind of elephant." Most would probably pick a mammoth for that type of elephant. But, in the Seventeenth Century, idiots and educated alike had only the vaguest idea what an elephant looked like and even less idea what its skeleton looked like. The educated were aware that the lack of data for comparative anatomy was a problem, but there was nothing they could do about it. There weren't enough elephants to go around.

Between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, we have records of exactly two elephants appearing in European Christendom. One belonged to Charlemagne and the other to Henry III of England. This began to change during the Sixteenth Century. After the Portuguese reached India by going around Africa, they began bringing back elephants that various Indian kings sent as gifts to their king. Manuel I sent one of those elephants named Hanno to Pope Leo X. The elephant died soon after. When Leo died he was buried with his elephant. The Portuguese kings sent least four others to their fellow monarchs during that century. In the Seventeenth Century, elephants were still rare, but the owners began sending them on tours, both to show off their wealth and to educate the population. Two elephants in particular influenced the debate between the doctors and Tentzel.

The first was named Hansken. After the Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese out of the India trade, one of their agents acquired a young female elephant in Ceylon in 1637. Once in Europe, her owners taught her some tricks and and sent her on a tour of the continent where she performed before audiences in an approximation of modern circus acts. After eighteen years on the road, she injured her foot in Italy, developed an infection, and died in Florence on November 9, 1655. A special mass was written for her. Grand Duke Ferdinando II was obsessed with the new sciences and had most of the good parts of Hansken removed before burying her. He had the skeleton mounted as accurately as possible and had her skin stuffed with straw for his collection.

Hansken, by Rembrandt. The British Museum.

There is no name recorded for the second elephant. In June of 1681, a showman named Wilkins brought an elephant to Dublin, Ireland and set up a booth near the Custom House to show it. Early on the morning of Friday the seventeenth, the booth caught fire and the poor creature was killed before Wilkins could bring it to safety. Wilkins realized there was still money to be made from his elephant if he could salvage the skeleton and continue his tour displaying it. He arranged for a troop of musketeers to be sent over to guard the corpse from souvenir seekers while he set out to hire as many butchers as he could to clean the bones before the smell became a public nuisance.

Late in the day, a doctor named Alan Mullen heard about the elephant and rushed over to negotiate with Wilkins. Mullen wanted to have an orderly dissection with artists ready to make renderings of each part. Wilkins was willing to let Mullen direct the work of the butchers, but insisted they finish it in one day and dispose of the smelly parts before Sunday when they would not be allowed to work. Mullen ordered the butchers to start working immediately. They worked through the night and through Saturday, completing the work before the Sunday deadline.

Mullen wrote up descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s parts and sent an account to Will Petty of the Royal Philosophical Society in London. His examination was far superior to anything that been published in Europe (in India, veterinary treatises on elephants had been available for centuries). Petty had Mullen’s letter published as a pamphlet. In the forty-two pages Mullen describes all of the major organs and some of the muscle groups, but gives surprising little space to the bones. This lack is made for by a trifold diagram of the reconstructed skeleton, which Wilkins had managed to assemble and take back on the road, and a separate drawing of the skull.

Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

The Gotha doctors' belief that the bones were natural mineral occurrences and not organic remains was a peculiarly European idea. In most of the rest of the world, people had very little problem believing that unfamiliar old bones, even petrified and damaged ones, were organic remains. Renaissance Europeans had a tradition, derived from Neoplatonic philosophy, of a certain "power" in nature that allowed spontaneous generation. Things might grow based on no visible cause. Flies grow from poop, small pebbles appear in peoples' kidneys, Scottish geese grow out of driftwood, and, as even we moderns know, a crop of rocks grows in our gardens every winter. Another tradition, derived from a number of philosophic sources, held that certain other "powers" could give shape to growing things. This is why a piece of agate might have a landscape in it, another might have an image of the Virgin Mother in it, and other stones might be shaped like bones.

The doctors organized their arguments, Schnetter wrote them up, and they had them published and distributed to great thinkers around Europe by St. Valentine's day. The entire pamphlet is seven pages long and a sizable chunk of it is dedicated to describing the discovery. They spend very little space laying out the argument itself. They assume that most of their audience is already familiar with the basic elements of it. The largest part of the pamphlet is dedicated to citing contemporary thinkers who might agree with them. Between these two parts, they make a preemptive strike against Tentzel by explaining why the supposed bones could not be an elephant. One point is that, while the bones are not scattered, they are somewhat disarticulated. Each bone is separated from the next by at least the thickness of a hand. A second point is that the tusks appear to be hollow, not solid ivory. What appears to be the most damning point is that the skull looks nothing like an elephant. Why are the tusks up by the eyes and not by the mouth where everyone knows they should be?

Tentzel wrote a short response, which he submitted directly to the Duke (it still exists in the Gotha archives, but I haven't seen it). He took more time writing a full statement of his case and, by taking more time, was able to prepare a full rebuttal to the doctor's argument. He had a special advantage in preparing his case. As curator of the Duke' collections, he had access to fossils and other curiosities that he could compare with the bones. He had the bones themselves; the Duke had had him collect as many of the remains as he could. By taking more time he was able to interview the diggers and other witnesses to excavation. And he had Mullen's pamphlet with its detailed drawings of the skeleton and skull.

Tentzel's public presentation appeared in the April issue of a journal that he wrote every month called Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern (Monthly Conversations between Good Friends about All Kinds of Books). It runs 108 pages with an illustration of the skull. After a detailed description of the discovery, the fictional friends of the title take sides. Caecilius and Passagirer take Tentzel's position and Aurelius and Didius defend the doctors”. Naturally, most of the space is given to the former.

Tentzel's skull. Monatliche Unterredungen... April 1696.

Mullen's pamphlet is liberally quoted to show that the Tonna bones have the same proportions as the Dublin ones. Tentzel admits that there is a problem here; his elephant is twice as big as the Dublin one. He has an answer to that problem. Among the observers he interviewed was a Dutch sailor who had spent many years in India. The sailor informed him that elephants keep growing. By the size of the tusks, he estimated that the Tonna elephant must have been at least 200 years old. Caecilius and Passagirer describe many other recent discoveries of large bones and ivory described by reputable witnesses. When Aurelius and Didius get their turn, to Tentzel's credit, they give an accurate summary of the doctor's position rather than a parody of it. They still lose the debate.

Along with his summary of Mullen's pamphlet, Tentzel mentions Hansken and says he is writing to some illustrious colleagues in Italy to get accurate measurements of it. In July, he published a long letter in Latin to Antonio Magliabechi, the personal librarian to Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, the brother of Grand Duke Ferdinando. Magliabechi was one of the major figures of the Republic of Letters during that generation and widely renowned for his disgusting personal hygiene. In his letter, Tentzel repeated most what he had written in Monatliche Unterredungen, leaving out the literary floutishes and defense of the doctors' position. Magliabechi and his Italian peers enthusiastically endorsed Tentzel's conclusions and sent the detailed information he requested. Italian scholars, as opposed to those north of the Alps, had no trouble accepting the presence of elephants on their lands. First, there were the war elephants of Pyrrus and Hannibal. Later, there were the many elephants brought by the Romans to be slaughtered in the circuses for entertainment. Magliabechi and several others wrote their own pamphlets and letters to journals.

As Northwestern Europeans began to accept the presence of elephants on their lands, the discoveries of Italian scholars were frequently cited to make the idea easier to accept. However, in the long run this delayed the acceptance of the idea of other, extinct, elephant-like species. Tentzel had his own cautious approach to the responses of his Italian correspondents. He was glad to have their endorsement for his conclusion that the remains were elephantine in nature. However, he distanced himself from the idea that the remains came from historical times. In his Monatliche Unterredungen, piece, he had Caecilius and Passagirer carefully go over various historical arguments and reject them. This could not be Charlemagne's elephant because it died in Northern Germany. This could not have been an elephant of Attila's because he moved to fast to have used elephants. It could not have belonged to some unknown merchant or returning crusader because no one would have abandoned something as valuable as the tusks. The very location of the tusks argued against human agency. Tentzel pointed out that the clear layering of strata above the remains showed that the ground had never been disrupted by human action.

Tentzel's arguments appear quite modern up to this point. His conclusion will appear less so to most contemporary readers. Tentzel was quite firm in arguing that the position of the remains was proof of the Noachian Deluge. This was a special interest of his ans a topic he regularly returned to in Monatliche Unterredungen. It's possible that his main interest in the boned was that he saw them as proof of the Deluge. To him, the northward orientation of the skeleton showed that it had drifted up from the south. The neat layering of the strata above it was the sort of deposition he expected from the receding flood waters.

Tentzel's argument that the bones were the actual organic remains of an elephant had an additional strength. As scientific communication moved from letters, however widely distributed, to printed journals, with much wider distribution, illustrations became much more important and accurate. Perhaps the most important parts of Mullen's pamphlet were the illustrations. Only a small number of living scholars had seen a live elephant and only a very tiny number had seen a skeleton. Tentzel took very conscious advantage of the importance of Mullen's skull illustration.

The skull of Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

It took me a few looks to understand this illustration. Why do the tusks look so short compared to the profile? What's with that little hook at the end? I went back to my sources on elephant dentition (it's a surprisingly complex topic. Some day I'll write about it. I'm not sure how much the book needs). My first thought was that it was the tusk core, but that's soft tissue, not bone and, in any case, it doesn't have that hook at the end. Then it occurred to me, we're looking at the tusks from the tips. Most illustrations would tilt the skull to emphasize their length. Mullen already showed their length in the full skeleton profile. The tusks curve forward from the skull. A front-on view of the skull dramatically reduces the apparent length of the tusks.

Tentzel's illustration shows the same apparent shortness. By his own measurements, the tusks should be longer that the skull. To emphasize the similarity with Mullen's illustration, he portrayed his skull with the same orientation. It lacked the drama that tipping the skull forward and showing of the tusks would have had, but it strengthened his larger argument that the Tonna remains were those of an elephant.

The majority of scholars agreed with Tentzel about the remains being elephants though a significant minority sided with a doctors. A small minority still held out for giants. The great majority also agreed about the Deluge being the cause of their deposition, though a small number had begun to doubt the historical reality of a global flood. It would be another century before they became a narrow majority.

The Tonna elephant would be cited by proto-paleontologists for decades but their significance would evolve over time. At first they were nothing more than an argument for the organic nature of fossils. Later, as the debate over mammoths developed, they would become an argument for the idea that elephants had once lived far north of the tropics. Next, they would be cited as a mammoth, rather than an elephant.

The remains are probably gone now. If any parts are still in the Gotha collections, they are no longer identified as such. That doesn't mean we can't identify the species. In recent years, paleontologists have returned to the Tonna quarries and worked the layer of white sand. They have dated it to the late Eemian, the warmest period before the last ice age. The most common proboscidean in that strata is the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). This species was first identified in 1847. It had a fairly wide range across Europe. Some of them wandered into Sicily when the seas were low during the glacial maxima. There, constrained by the limited resources of an island, they underwent a process of dwarfing, eventually becoming Elephas mnaidriensis, the cyclops skeletons I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Tentzel only published Monatliche Unterredungen for one more year after his treatment of the Tonna remains. The following January, he wrote a shorter piece quoting the responses he had received from Italy. At the turn of the century, he moved on to a new job with King of Saxony and briefly published a new journal. During that time a second skeleton was found at Tonna and he and Schnetter went at it one more time, but neither added anything new to their arguments. The job with the King of Saxony didn't work out and Tentzel died in poverty. Despite his relevance during the next century, he has largely been relegated to footnote status since. This appears to changing. He's had some attention lately for his role as a science communicator. I'm doing my best to see that he gets some attention for his science as well.

The mammoths of Niederweningen

During the summer of 1890, a work crew employed by the Swiss Northeastern Railway labored to extend a short spur up a valley from Zurich to the far side of the tiny hamlet of Niederweningen. As they approached their goal in July, they found convenient a layer of gravel on the south side of the tracks. The layer of gravel was nothing surprising. Switzerland was well processed during the ice ages and strata of glacial till were common in the valleys. What was surprising was the bones they found beneath it.

Unlike many stories I've told here, there was no mystery about the bones. By 1890, the ice age, extinction, and Pleistocene giants were completely accepted by European intellectuals. The workers, or at least their supervisors, knew the bones were something special that needed to be preserved. The railroad might even have had a formal policy about such things. They carefully collected each bone and took it to the local inn for storage. By the beginning of August, it was clear that there were a lot of bones there. The minister of the church in nearby Dielsdorf, Pastor Schluep (I can't find his first name), sent a telegram to the president of the Zurich Antiquarian Society telling him about the find.

The telegram arrived on August 2, a Saturday. Before the day was over, Arnold Lang was in Niederweningen eager to examine the site. As soon as business opened on Monday, he met with local authorities and the management of the railway and arranged formal permission to examine the site. In a mere two weeks he organized an conducted a full excavation of the site. During that time he not only collected bones, he brought in experts to examine the geological situation and botanical remains associated with the bones. In his account, he spends more words thanking the the people who helped him than in describing the actual work—something that is personally classy but frustrating to later historians and paleontologists. The following year Lang organized a second formal excavation. Remarkably, with all time he had to plan, they found little to add to his first, tiny, improvised season.

Lang thought mammoths were the most important part of the find. In his 1892 article, he cited mammoths in his title. The description of the find was buried deep within a historical essay on mammoth discoveries. Lang writes that they identified bones from six individual mammoths (modern paleontologists say seven), one so small he thought it might be a fetus. There were also bones from wolves, horses, birds, rodents, and a woolly rhinoceros that Lang calls "the constant companion of the extinct mammoths."

Herr Dreyer, one of the experts Lang recruited, used bones from all the adult mammoths to assemble a composite skeleton which was mounted and displayed in the zoology museum at the University of Zurich. Lang's drawing shows something remarkable about Dreyer's preparation. He put the tusks on the wrong sides. This wasn't a personal quirk of his; many paleontologists thought that was the proper mounting. Look carefully at some of the artwork from the time. Though mammoths are usually shown in profile, if you study the shading you'll see that the artists were portraying outward facing tusks. Unfortunately, art directors, even at scientific magazines, still use these illustrations. This is something of a pet peeve of mine.

The Niederweningen mammoth of 1892 (source)

The paleontologists and artists of the time labored under a certain disadvantage with respect to mammoths. No one had ever recovered a skull with the tusks still attached. In Siberia, where most mammoth remains were found, the finders were allowed to take and sell the ivory before notifying the authorities. And most of them preferred not to tell the authorities at all. In Europe, skulls didn't have a very good survival rate. The skulls of elephants and mammoths are very fragile. Though they look solid, they are actually made of of thin plates of bone honeycombed with sinuses. This makes them lighter. When the skulls were dug from the ground by farmers and railroad laborers, they frequently fell apart before scientists could arrive to examine them.

But, given all the possible arrangements, why did they choose one that looks so patently absurd to us? To be fair, they didn't all believe that. The proper placement was, as we say, controversial. Several placements had been suggested. By the 1890s, quite a few had come around to the right placement. At the root of it all was a conceptual problem. Western naturalists believed that all horns, antlers, fangs, and tusks had to be functional weapons. A moose's antlers might be over-engineered because the ladies love a good rack, but, in the end, they still need to be able to give a good thrashing to any challengers. The French word for an elephant's tusks is "défenses." In fact, modern elephants don't stab with their tusks; they swing sideways and hit with them.

Another argument was that the final inward curve of an old mammoth's tusks would have blocked their vision. The growth of an a mammoth's tusks begins downward and outward. They then curve forward and the outward growth ceases. By the time they seriously curve upward, they also begin to curve inward. In some old bulls, the tips actually cross in front of their faces. And that was the problem. Some naturalists, who weren't that familiar with elephant anatomy, thought this would dangerously obstruct their vision. However, an elephants eyes are not on the front of their skull. Like most herbivores, their eyes are on the side. The line of sight that these naturalists thought would be obstructed was already a blind spot for mammoths. Still, I am charmed by the image of old, cross-eyed mammoths staggering around the tundra supported by their woolly rhinoceros buddies.

During the 2003 and 2004 excavation seasons, new digs were conducted in Niederweningen. One of them was conducted at the same site as the 1890-1 dig. Like Lang, the organizers of these digs included botanists and geologists in their teams. They also took advantage of cores drilled during the eighties that revealed the geologic strata down to the bedrock twenty meters below the village. What they discovered was that the ice age before the most recent one scoured the valley clean. During the last glacial maximum, the ice didn't reach the future site of Niederweningen. For over 130,000 years, the valley has been home to alternating lakes and peat bogs.

Lang reported that the mammoths and other bones were discovered just beneath the gravel that the railroad desired and on top of a layer of peat. His geologists dug through the peat to reveal a layer of clay and silt—lake sediment—below it. Modern geologists interpret the gravel as glacial till washed down from the surrounding mountains at the end of the last ice age. The date the transition from peat bog to alluvial plain is uncertain. There is evidence of some erosion just above the boundary. The bones have been dated to 33-34 thousand years old while the peat just below it is six to eight thousand years older. Lang found some pits in the peat that he thought might have been mammoth footprints. Of they were, they weren't from any of the mammoths he found.

Dreyer's composite skeleton is still in Zurich (they have since fixed the tusks). Many of the other bones, including the woolly rhinoceros and the baby mammoth remained in Niederweningen. The 2004 dig discovered over half of a mammoth including the jaw, tusks, most of the limb bones, and part of the pelvis. The good citizens of Niederweningen promptly built a museum for their new mammoth. Due to the richness of the site, there will certainly be future digs there. I look forward to hearing about them.

The new Niederweningen mammoth (source)

Kitcher's giants

Athanasius Kircher is perhaps the most interesting mind of the Seventeenth Century. The German born Jesuit wrote over forty books on comparative linguistics, volcanoes, music theory, magnetism, China, diseases, and anything else that crossed his path. He claimed to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, he used the newly-invented microscope and suggested that the tiny "animacules" caused plague and other diseases, he was the first European to publish Sanskrit, he coined he word "electromagnetism", he built a museum of mechanical gadgets, and he designed the cat piano. A recent collection of conference papers about him was entitled "The Last Man Who Knew Everything."

The times he lived in and the broad range of his interests ensured that a lot of what he wrote was bunk and, for almost 300 years, he was dismissed as a colorful crank. Lately, that's begun to change. Kircher was an influential figure in his day and it's not possible to write an accurate account of the scientific revolution without taking him into account. Even before his intellectual rehabilitation began, his books had been rediscovered as objects of art. Many of them are illustrated with fantastic illustrations and interesting maps--one shows the location of Atlantis. One of his most frequently reproduced illustrations compares the sizes of famous giants.

Kircher's Giants. Source.

Most cultures have a tradition of giants. I won't say "all", because whenever you say that there will be a cultural anthropologist who will show up to make a liar out of you. But there is quite a rich tradition in what became Western Civilization. The tradition drinks from four fountains. The first, is the mythology of Classical civilizations. This included the Titans, whom the gods of Olympus had to vanquish before they could rule, and the heroes, who must have had a great stature to match their great acts. Next, was the Jewish tradition, which was well known even before Christians made it dogma in the remains of the Roman Empire. This included the Antediluvian giants of Genesis 6; the tribes defeated by Moses, Joshua, and David; and the ancient patriarchs themselves. Third, were the local traditions of Northern regions gradually incorporated in Christendom. Finally, were the actual discoveries of large bones found in caves and plowed up in fields from time to time. By the time Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the first two fountains had been combined into a kind of standard list. Over the next thousand years, giants from the other two fountains were added to the list.

Kircher's famous illustration is from the second volume of his wonderful book Mundus Subterraneus (The Underground World). It shows five figures all in the same pose. Two are from ancient sources, two are from recent (to him) sources, and one is a normal man. The four on the right ascend from left to right while the one on the far left overshadows them all. His position, out of order, demonstrates his specialness. The point of the illustration is not to provide visual comparison of famous giants; it is to make a point about that particular giant. Kircher, who later writers would call gullible, thinks that giant is ridiculous.

The biggest giant is from the works of the late Medieval satirist Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio was a pivotal figure in Italian literature, but he was also a literary critic and historian. In his Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gods and gentiles), he tried to make sense of confused and often contradictory accounts of the Greek and Roman pantheons and, as much as possible, tie them into local histories. The giant illustrated by Kircher was a discovery that happened in Sicily during Boccaccio's lifetime. Some writers have said Boccaccio claimed to have been a witness to the discovery. He didn't. He was 400 miles away in Tuscany at the time and only reported what he was told. So, what was he told?

In 1342, near Trepani, on the western end of Sicily, a group of workers, digging the foundation for a new house, uncovered a deep cave. They climbed in and found a great grotto where they saw the figure of a seated man of almost unimaginable size. In his hand he held a staff as large as ship's mast. According to their report, he was 200 cubits tall (300 or 400 feet, depending on your cubit). The workers hurried back to the village of Erice to share the story of their discovery. Soon, a crowd of 300 people armed with torches and pitchforks marched to the work site and entered the cave. Once inside the grotto, they paused, all frightened and awestruck except for one brave man who stepped forward and touched the staff. It disintegrated leaving only dust and some iron pieces. He then touched the leg of the titan who also turned to dust leaving only some enormous teeth.

The teeth were taken to the Church of the Annunciation where they were strung on a wire to be displayed. This was a common practice in the days before museums. Wonders of nature were given to churches to inspire the faithful with the endless wonders of God's creation. Boccaccio does not report what happened to the iron. We can safely assume that the local blacksmith took advantage of the free materials.

There was some debate over the identity of the giant. Some thought he was Eryx, a legendary early king and founder of the village. Although a demigod himself, Eryx was killed in boxing match with his fellow demigod Hercules. The opposing and more popular theory was that he was the cyclops Polyphemus and this was the cave where he was blinded by Odysseus and his crew. In making that claim, they faced some competition. Over the years, a number of villages had discovered a number of caves containing the bones of a number of giants and all had proclaimed their giant to be Polyphemus. Classics scholars, then and now, believed that the Odyssey described an itinerary of real places around the central Mediterranean and that Sicily was the home of Polyphemus. Even the average peasant knew this and was proud of the history of their island. If the local giant wasn't Polyphemus, enough giants had been found that no one doubted that the island had once been home to a whole race of them.

In the early Twentieth Century, the Austrian paleontologist Otheniel Abel wondered if there was more to the story than mere myth . Fifty years earlier, in 1862, Hugh Falconer, one of the first great authorities on the diversity of extinct proboscideans, had presented a paper on the discovery of the remains of a dwarf elephant on the island of Malta. Falconer named it Elephas melitensis. In the years after that, other dwarfed species were found on most of the major Mediterranean islands. All of these species, except one, are believed to descended from Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant. The exception is a dwarf mammoth that lived on Sardinia. Sicily is especially rich in these fossils, having been home to three different species of dwarfed elephants at different times. Abel thought the skeletons explained the origin of the cyclops myth.

Most land mammals share a basic skeletal structure, but proboscieans and humans have some very specific resemblances. These are mostly in the limbs. Both have long straight limbs with short ankles or wrists and five digits. Laying the disarticulated bones of a probosciean out on the ground, it's easy to form something that looks like an enormous, stocky human. Then comes the problem of the skull. Abel pointed out that the most distinguishing feature of the skull, if the tusks are missing, is a huge hole in the middle of the face. This is the nasal cavity with all of the attachments for the trunk. The eye sockets are on the sides of the skull are almost unnoticeable. This would make it very easy for an awestruck discoverer to mistake the nasal cavity for the socket of a single huge eye.

Elephas melitensis. Source.

Other differences in the skulls can be explained by the fact that giants are, by definition, monsters. Add to this the fact that probosciean skulls are not solid and bony. They are made of thin plates, honeycombed with sinuses and, when dried out, tend to fall apart at the first touch leaving nothing to be systematically examined.

Kircher raised some rather sophisticated environmental and bio-mechanical arguments against the possibility of a giant of that size having ever existed. He said it couldn't have been taller than forty feet. His illustration is meant to show how silly the claims of Boccaccio's informants were. Kircher thought the other figures on his illustration were reasonable. Starting next to Boccaccio's monster is the little, tiny figure of a normal human who barely reaches his ankle. Reaching to mid-calf is Goliath of Gath, who normal guy David smote with a stone. The figure on the far right, which Kircher calls the giant of Mauritania, was a skeleton found in Morocco according to the highly respected Roman writer Pliny [actually, it was Plutarch]. To his left was a giant found within the living memory of Kircher's elders and, artistically, the most important influence on his illustration.

When the prominent Basel physician Felix Plater was called to Lucern in 1584 to care for the ailing Colonel Ludwig Pfyffer, he expected to spend his spare time collecting rare plants on the neighboring mountains and visiting with his friend Renward Cysat. He was successful on both counts. He gathered over a hundred samples of plants unknown to him and Cysat had a special treat for him: mysterious bones.

Cysat explained that, seven years earlier, a tremendous storm had buffeted the village of Reyden, a village that Plater had passed through on his way to Lucern. When the brothers of the local monastery came out to inspect the damage, they found that an ancient oak on Kommende Hill had been knocked over. Tangled among it's roots were the bones that Cysat now showed Plater.

Many of the bones were damaged and only a few fragments of the skull remained. Naturally, the workmen were blamed for mishandling them. Plater convinced the city council to let him take them back to Basel with him for study. From the long bones of the arms and legs and, especially, digits that appeared to be a thumb, Plater felt confident in telling the Lucerners that they had the remains of a human giant. By his calculations, it stood fourteen strich tall (nineteen feet) in life. Since giants were not part of any local traditions, he believed that it must have lived and died during some prehistoric time before normal humans arrived in the mountains.

Plater asked Hans Bock, an artist who happened to be painting his portrait at the time, to prepare large drawings of the bones and an imaginative drawing of the giant as it must have appeared in life. In Boch's reconstruction, the heavily bearded giant stands with one hand on a dead tree, perhaps the oak, naked except for a laurel and a girdle of oak leaves. The beard and garb of leaves make him look like the Green Man and probably indicate his primitive state. Despite Plater's conclusion that the giant and normal people had never lived together, Bock included a modern man, gaping in awe at the giant, for comparison.

The Lucerners were delighted, both with Plater's conclusions and with Bock's drawings. The bones were put on display in the city hall and the giant was made the shield-bearer of the city coat of arms. They had a version of Bock's drawing painted on a tower attached to the city hall with a poem telling the story of his discovery. That wasn't the end of the giant's fame. In the next century, Cysat and members of the city council decided to decorate the three footbridges that connected the two parts of the city across the Reuss River. They hired Hans Heinrich Wägmann, a local artist, to paint triangular panels to be hung inside the bridges attached to the roof trusses. Prominent citizens were encouraged to sponsor panels and in return, their family crests were incorporated into the paintings. Cysat bought panel number one on the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke). For the subject, he chose Bock's giant along with a poem that he composed.

The giant of Reyden displayed on the Kapellbrücke. Source.

Kircher, or his artist, used some version Bock's drawing as the standard giant to illustrate the relative sizes of famous giants and discredit Boccaccio's giant. All six of Kircher's giants have the same posture and attire of Bock's giant. In a modern court of law, that would probably be enough to nail him for plagiarism. In his day, the modern concept of plagiarism was just emerging and the first copyright laws were still a generation in the future. His use of Bock's drawing would have been considered more along the lines of an homage to the original artist than theft.

There were apparently differences among the three original versions of the giant—Bock's drawing, the tower mural, and the Kapellbrücke panel. I only have access to one, but I can make an educated guess at the source of Kitcher's version. Bock's original drawing was sent back to Platter in Basel and ended up in the library of the local Jesuit monastery. Even though Kircher was a Jesuit, he would have had to have visited the monastery to have viewed it. Kircher spend most of his productive life in Italy, rarely going far from Rome. The mural on the tower is gone. After years of neglect, the city decided it was irreparable and had it painted over in the 1860s. I haven't been able to locate any surviving drawings or photographs of it. Later, the stucco was scraped off the tower to reveal the underlying stone walls. In 1993, a fire destroyed most of the Kapellbrücke. Cysat's panel was one only thirty (of the original 158) that was saved. Like Bock's original drawing, Kircher never saw the panel or the tower, though it's possible that he may have seen sketches made by some other traveler. If he did, he didn't mention it.

Kircher's written description of the discovery gives a clue as to where he might have seen the giant. Platter published an account of the discovery in a collection of medical essays in 1614. Kircher's version bears no resemblance to this. Except for short paragraphs before and after, the majority of his account is a long quote of a legal affidavit filed by Cysat in Lucerne. We don't have to look far to discover where found the affidavit.

In 1661, three years before that volume of Mundus Subterraneus appeared, a small book written in German by Cysat's son appeared in Lucern. The book was a history of the city and the surrounding countryside. In the context of describing the towers and bridges of the city, the younger Cysat tells the story of the giant of Reyden. At the center of his narrative is his father's affidavit. He also included the poem from the tower along with a drawing of the giant.

Young Cysat's illustration. Source.

When Platter examined the Reyden bones, the idea of historically real giants was just beginning to be challenged. Because giants are unambiguously mentioned in the Bible, these challenges were in the form of arguments that the Bible used the word giant in an allegorical sense; the giants of the Old Testament were great in their capacity for evil, not in their actual stature. This position did not automatically kill the giants. Writing almost ninety years after the discovery of the Reyden giant, the most Kircher would say was that real giants weren't mush bigger than twenty feet tall. In the early 1700s, the French academy published a flurry of papers arguing both sides of the giant question. As late as 1764, the influential doctor Claude-Nicolas LeCat could receive a polite hearing before the academy while arguing for the historical reality of giants.

What finally did the giants in was the development of the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. When Cysat showed Platter the bones, he had very little to compare them with. He knew whales and elephants were very large animals, but no accurate anatomical information was available to him, not even good drawings. It was only after his death that showmen were able to acquire elephants from India and show them in towns and villages in Europe. The first anatomical studies were in the 1780s, well after Kircher was dead. Paleontology, building on comparative anatomy, took another hundred years to develop.

In 1783, the young naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach traveled through Switzerland. He knew the story of the giant of Reyden and wanted to see what the truth was. In Lucerne, he found that Platter had returned the bones to Cysat who put them back in their place of honor in the Council Hall. By then, only three fragments survived. After an examination, he felt confident identifying them as the bones of an elephant. His confidence was as strong as Platter's and more accurate. Thirteen years later, he was one of the first to decide that the mammoth and mastodon were distinct species, different from the known species of elephants (he was also one of the first to assert that Asian and African elephants were different species).

The last of the Reyden giant. Source. 

By 2013, only one fragment remained in Lucerne. It now resided in the Lucerne Natural History Museum instead of the Council Hall. That February, the keeper of the museum website and Adelheid Aregger, a journalist with an interest in cultural matters, got into a conversation about the bones. Looking over Blumenbach's account of his visit they realized that he had taken pieces with him when he left. Aregger and her husband continued to look into the story. The Blumenbach collection at Göttingen included quite a few bones. Using isotope analysis, they were able to identify two pieces of mammoth thigh that had come from the same soil as the as the remaining piece in Lucerne. Kircher got blacklight posters and the Lucerne bones didn't. But they're still pretty cool.

Happy Führertodestag

Today is the sixty-ninth Führertodestag, a holiday that not nearly enough of us celebrate. The word itself means "dead leader day." My anarchist and hyper-libertarian friends will be disappointed to find out that this is not a holiday marked by joyous assassinations. No, it is the commemoration of the death of one particular leader. I'm sure you have figured out who I mean. On this day in 1945, Adolf Hitler killed himself along with Eva Hitler, nee Braun, his wife of two days. Within days of their deaths, witnesses to the events surrounding their suicides and to the disposal of their remains had been interviewed and enough remains recovered to make positive identification of both of the Hitlers. Yet, for the rest of the century, rumors persisted that he had survived (no one really cared about Eva). Elaborate mythologies were created combining Hitler's last days, rumored Nazi super-weapons, Cold War rivalries, ancient mystical orders, UFOs, Atlantis, and even a physically impossible hollow earth. How did all this begin?

Hitler's ability to survive was legendary long before the end. He survived over twenty known assassination attempts before July 20, 1944. It became common knowledge that he employed look-alikes to camouflage his movements and confuse potential assassins. As a student I wrote a short paper on how the news of the July 1944 assassination attempt was diffused through the West. Within hours of the first reports, the idea that the plot had failed because the conspirators had tried to kill the wrong Hitler was being reported throughout the world. I traced the first mention of this idea to a newspaper in Zurich. I suspect that the writer jumped to that conclusion by looking at a list of the casualties released by the Germans and seized on the one name unknown to the writer. All of the others were easily identified military figures, the odd man out was "Dr. Berger". Who was he and why was he meeting with these important men? Obviously, he must have been Hitler's double. In fact, he was a stenographer. Hitler survived that attempt because the bomb was misplaced and because the blast shields over the windows were opened, allowing the pressure from the blast to disperse. Had it been a colder day, Hitler would have died along with Dr. Berger.

Following the July 1944 assassination attempt, Hitler stopped making public appearances. His whereabouts were never publicly mentioned. This led to a new set of rumors and a fascinating schizophrenia of rumors. With his retreat from the public eye, some observers began to speculate that he was dead and that the regime was only pretending he was alive because they needed his image. Once the regime announced he was dead, conspiracy minded observers claimed it was a ruse to cover his escape. The closest analogue I can think of is L. Ron Hubbard, the inventor of Scientology. For the last twenty years of his life, he moved in and out of seclusion, traveling around the world, leaving detractors to wonder if he was still alive. Once his death was announced, other, or even the same, detractors speculated that his death had been faked. I'm fairly certain both Hitler and Hubbard are dead.

Hitler did not die in July 1944. He survived and watched the capture, "trial," and execution of anyone even remotely associated with the plotters. He saw the failure of the counter-offensive on the Western Front which we call the Battle of the Bulge. He watched the Western Allies liberate France, the Low Countries, cross the Rhine and conqueror Western Germany. He watched the despised Slavic/Communist hordes conquer the Balkans, Poland, and march into the center of Berlin. He might have escaped the city, but he chose to stay and sent emissaries to rally imagined reserves beyond the capitol to come to his aid for a last stand.

By the last week of April 1945, Hitler, Eva, their dogs, the Göbbels family, some military commanders, and support personnel were held up in the Führerbunker, a heavily fortified complex beneath the courtyard of the central government complex, the Chancellery. This was more than a mere bomb shelter. It was a command center with private suites for the leaders of the Reich, their families, and top military personnel. The grounds above were pleasant gardens with off-season greenhouses. But, in April 1945, the gardens weren't that pleasant. Combat between the final German reserves and the Soviet juggernaut had reduced most of the city to ruins. The front line was blocks from the Führerbunker.

When Adolf and Eva married, they knew the end had come and it was a curiously sentimental act in their already-planned joint suicide. A few hours after their marriage, they tested their planned method of cyanide and gunshot on Hitler's dog Blondi. At about three-thirty in the afternoon of Monday, April 30, 1945, Mr. and Mrs. Hitler retired to their private suite and killed themselves. A half hour later the other inhabitants of the bunker, entered the suite to see if Hitler was really dead. While his doctor checked the two bodies, Hitler's valet tidied up a spill made when Eva knocked over a vase full of cut flowers in her death throes. They wrapped the bodies in blankets and carried them up to the Chancellery courtyard for disposal. On the way out, they were met by Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kempka, returning from a scavenging expedition to find enough gasoline to cremate the bodies. He had been able to find 200 liters, which was more than enough for the task. The group placed the bodies in a prepared ditch, drenched them in the gas, and, after a few false starts, set them on fire.

This private cremation was in accordance with Hitler's last wishes. He had left explicit instructions that his body be completely destroyed and that the only witnesses be his innermost, trusted circle of associates. They failed him on both accounts. The private ceremony, conducted under artillery fire from the Russian army only a few blocks away, was witnessed by at least two German soldiers patrolling the Chancellery buildings. Though the fire burned for nearly eight hours, with no one to tend it, it failed to completely destroy the bodies. We can only speculate about Hitler's motives in ordering his body to be disposed of in such a manner. While he may have been concerned about denying his enemies--especially Stalin--a ghoulish trophy, his main objective was probably pure mischief. He wanted to leave his enemies in confusion, fearing his return and suspecting each other of knowing more than they were telling. In this, he was a tremendous success.

Five days before Hitler's suicide, Pravda wrote that he was not in Berlin, but that he had escaped to Bavaria to make a last stand in the mountains and had left a double to die in his place. The writers and editors of this article left no documentation as to why they said this. Why not report such a rumor? If the Red Army cleared Berlin and didn't find Hitler, the responsibility for his escape would his cleverness and the Americans' gormlessness. If they did capture him, woot! But what if it wasn't so clear?

According to his political will, Hitler divided his powers between three of his associates: Admiral Karl Dönitz was to be President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Göbbels became Chancellor, and Martin Bormann became the head of the Nazi Party. The absence of better known names such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, is explained by some last minute back-stabbing by Bormann. Joseph and Magda Göbbels were at the bunker and managed to protect Joseph's position.

Around midnight, as the cremation fires were dying, General Hans Krebs left the bunker and began crawling through the rubble of the city toward Soviet army headquarters. The trip of a few blocks took hours and it was almost sunrise when he arrived and escorted into the presence of General Vasily Chuikov. Krebs described the events of the previous day and said he was authorized by Chancellor Goebbels to negotiate a cease-fire. Chuikov had an aide get on the phone with the head of the Soviet army, Marshall Grigory Zhukov, and Zhukov had an aide get on the phone with Stalin. This means Stalin definitely knew of Hitler's death on the morning of May 1.

Stalin rejected Krebs' offer. Around noon, Chuikov notified him of this fact had the general escorted back to the bunker. Having done his duty, Krebs joined two other army officers to get roaring drunk, sing American sea shanties, and kill themselves. After dinner, Magda Göbbels, the wife of the new Chancellor, poisoned six of their children. Then she and her husband dressed as if stepping out for the evening, climbed the stairs to the courtyard, and killed themselves. At 9:40, Admiral Dönitz--now President Dönitz--addressed the German people from a Hamburg radio station. In introducing the new president, the announcer said, "It is reported from the Führer's headquarters that our Führer, Adolph Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational command post at the Reich Chancellery." There were at least two lies in the announcement. Hitler died a day earlier than Dönitz said and he did not die in battle. The remaining inhabitants of the bunker, including Martin Bormann, divided into two groups and made a break for freedom near midnight. Most were killed or captured by the Russians in the attempt.

The last person in the bunker was Johannes Hentschel, a lowly mechanic who had dutifully kept the ventilation, electricity, and water running during the previous dramatic days. At one point, he had climbed up to the greenhouse and gathered up enough garden hoses to run a water line from the bunker's private well to an army field hospital that had been set up on the far side of the Chancellery building. By keeping the water running he may have saved the lives of over three hundred wounded soldiers. Now, on May 2, he stayed on to watch his machinery. At dawn, he returned to the ruins of the greenhouse and cut several bouquets of tulips and lilacs, which he placed around the bunker to freshen the stale air. He fixed a large breakfast and did the dishes. With his duties complete, he waited for the Russians to arrive.

A few minutes after nine, he heard foreign voices in the upper bunker and prepared to surrender. The first Russians into the bunker were a group of women medical officers on a looting expedition. They had no interest in prisoners and left Hentschel in the hallway while they went to dig through Eva Braun's closets. A few minutes later, two commissars with drawn pistols arrived. Hentschel prepared to surrender again, and could easily have been shot on the spot, except for the fact that the doctors chose that moment to rush up the stairs, giggling and waving Eva's frilly underwear over their heads. The commissars listened to Hentschel's story of the Fuehrer's end. Another, larger, group of officers had arrived while he was telling the story and discovered the liquor supply. One of them handed Hentschel a mug of champagne and toasted the end of the war. Other arriving groups insisted on Hentschel repeating his story and giving tours of the bunker, but they let him take a short nap before sending him off as a POW.

Hentschel was already gone when a team arrived in the afternoon to hunt for Hitler's body. This team recovered the Göbbels' bodies and left. A second team found a bloated body in a water tank that had correct mustache and immediately declared it to be Hitler. This body is rumored to have been Gustav Weler, one of his doubles (I can't find a decent source to confirm this). On May 3, a Soviet private found the charred bodies of a man, woman, and two dogs hastily buried in a shell crater in the garden. This fact was duly noted by the inspectors, but it was two more days, on the fifth, before they combined that fact with the stories of Hentschel and Krebs and thought to examine the bodies. The following week, the Soviet inspectors located a dental assistant who had worked on Hitler's teeth the previous winter. Showing her a cigar box full of jaw fragments, she correctly identified both Hitler and Braun.

By mid-May the Soviets had eyewitness accounts of Hitler's death, the physical remains of his body, and a positive identification of those remains. They should have been able to make a positive announcement that the monster was dead, thanks to the work of the Soviet army who backed him into a corner from which he could not escape. On May 2, even as the first investigators were searching through the Chancellery grounds, Tass declared that the announcement from Dönitz was a trick. That same day, Eisenhower told reporters that Himmler, while attempting to negotiate a truce through Swedish intermediaries a week earlier had claimed Hitler was terminally ill. On the third, the official Soviet announcement of the surrender of the last German troops in Berlin mentioned witnesses talking about his suicide. German radio in the enclave under Dönitz's control continued to claim Hitler had died a hero's death in battle. In the space of a week, alert news watchers were offered three different causes of death and two dates of death, as well as well-grounded speculation that Hitler might have escaped. They didn't do that. Soviet news agencies were would remain contradictory and unhelpful for weeks after the fall of Berlin. Western media had only rumor and speculation to give their readers. The Atlanta Constitution demonstrated the dilemma of the Western press by reporting Dönitz's announcement of Hitler's death under the headline "If Hitler is Dead, Good Riddance." When honest facts emerged, there was no way to tell them apart from fantasy and rumor. The facts vanished into the white noise.

The Soviets continued to be difficult. They refused to allow Westerners into Berlin even after the surrender of Dönitz's government and the last armies in the field on May 7-9. On May 10, they announced the existence of the burned bodies in the Chancellery courtyard, but only allowed it might be Hitler. The same report went on to say that his body might never be found. On June 6, a spokesman for the Soviet army in Berlin announced unequivocally that Hitler had committed suicide and that his body had been identified. Three days later, Marshall Zhukov, gave a press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinski looking over his shoulder. "We did not identify the body of Hitler," he said. "I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment."

Stalin, by now, had discovered that a live Hitler might be useful to him. The possibility of a return of Hitler justified a harsh occupation and division of Germany. The same possibility required keeping tight control on Eastern Europe; only the Soviet big brother could protect them from a resurgent Germany should Hitler return. The possibility that Hitler might be hiding in Spain was used as an excuse to demand the Western Allies treat the Franco regime roughly. At one point, he even insisted that Britain and the US invade Spain just to make sure Hitler wasn't there. The suggestion that the Soviet army had allowed Hitler to escape, allowed Stalin to treat the generals with contempt and hide them from the public eye.

By June, the veil of secrecy that the Soviets had kept on Berlin had created a darkness too complete to be pierced by facts. They had given permission for the wildest imaginations to run free. Every story about Hitler's doubles and every sighting of the Führer, no matter how remote, was given straight-faced coverage by supposedly serious news outlets. The possibility that the Führer had escaped led numerous die-hard Nazis to brag about their part in helping him escape. Lieut. Arthur Mackensen told how he had flown Hitler from the Tiergarten Park on May 5 to Denmark, where the local Nazis held a mass rally to say farewell before the Führer departed for parts unknown. Others flew him to Spain or Japan or saw him board a U-boat for South America.

The last suggestion generated a flurry of excitement as the last U-boats at sea began surrendering during the summer. When the submarine U-530 surrendered to the Argentine authorities in early July, a Buenos Aries paper reported that the captain had delivered Hitler and Braun to a secret base in Antarctica before returning to South America to surrender. The same story was reported and embellished by the Chicago Times the following day. In August, the story had a second round with the surrender of U-977 to the Argentine authorities. The Hitler escaped to Antarctica myth transformed escape stories from the realm of the possible into the realm of the fantastic and spawned a whole sub-genre of conspiracy literature.

When I was growing up, Hitler sightings were a staple of tabloid news and it wasn't entirely unreasonable to think he might have escaped. There really were prominent Nazis living in South America and being protected by the military governments there. Adolf Eichmann lived in Argentina until 1960 when he was captured by Israeli Mosad agents. Josef Mengele lived in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil until 1979 when he accidentally drowned. During the war crimes trials after the war it was revealed that an underground organization of SS officers known as ODESSA was involved in smuggling war criminals out of Europe. The rumors that Hitler might have been one of the escapees persisted until the late eighties when he would have been almost a hundred years old. Just last month, the discovery of FBI files showing that J. Edgar Hoover ordered an investigation of one of the escape rumors in late 1945 made the rounds of the tabloids as proof that he survived the war.

For most of the world, Hitler didn't so die as vanish. A burned skeleton in the ruins of Chancellery was too anti-climactic. He had become such a personification of evil that people needed unquestionable proof that he was dead. They needed to see the monster with a stake through his heart before they could really believe he was gone. The Cold War world helped keep him alive. The Soviets didn't plan from the beginning to hide his death. Incompetence and confusion caused them to send out conflicting versions of his fate. At some point, Stalin discovered that keeping Hitler's fate ambiguous was useful. After Stalin's death, when the Soviets told the truth about what they knew, there was too much distrust of them in the West for people to unquestioningly accept their word. The best most people would say was that the Soviets were probably telling the truth. Only Hitler's hundredth birthday and the end of the Cold War finally allowed him to die.

Happy Führertodestag!

NOTE: Much of this post is a representation of a post I wrote on this day in 2006.

The elephants of Raphia and Gash-Barka

Writing seventy years after the fact, this is how Polybius described the Battle of Raphia between the Egyptian armies of Ptolemy IV and the Selucid (Persian) armies of Antiochus III in 217 BCE:

When Ptolemy and his sister after their progress had reached the extremity of his left wing and Antiochus with his horse-guards had reached his extreme right, they gave the signal for battle and brought the elephants first into action. A few only of Ptolemy's elephants ventured to close with those of the enemy, and now the men in the towers on the back of these beasts made a gallant fight of it, striking with their pikes at close quarters and wounding each other, while the elephants themselves fought still better, putting forth their whole strength and meeting forehead to forehead. ... Most of Ptolemy's elephants, however, declined the combat, as is the habit of African elephants; for unable to stand the smell and the trumpeting of the Indian elephants, and terrified, I suppose, also by their great size and strength, they at once turn tail and take to flight before they get near them. This is what happened on the present occasion; and when Ptolemy's elephants were thus thrown into confusion and driven back on their own lines, Ptolemy's guard gave way under the pressure of the animals.

Ptolemy's guard recovered and went on to win the battle without his elephants. Polybius credits the victory to Ptolemy being able to give better motivational speeches than Antiochus.

Aside from its strategic and geopolitical importance, the Battle of Raphia has attracted the attention of historians and natural historians for twenty-two centuries because it is the only recorded instance of African and Asian elephants facing each other in battle. Considering the fact that African elephants are usually regarded as untamable, it is one of the only recorded instances of African elephants being used in battle, period.

Polybius' statement that the African elephants were terrified by the "great size and strength" of the Asian elephants took on a life of its own. For the next twenty centuries, it was accepted wisdom among educated Europeans that Asian elephants are larger than African elephants. For most African and Asian elephants, this is not true. The average African elephant is much larger than the average Asian elephant. The exception to this rule is the African forest elephant which only recently was recognized as a third species. This species is much smaller than the African savanna elephant and slightly smaller than the Asian.

How this belief persisted if a fairly easy question to answer. During the heyday of the Roman Empire, virtually all of the elephants they saw were Asian elephants. No one had a chance to make side-by-side comparisons. After the fall of the Western Empire, very few elephants made it to Europe at all. The handful that did (admittedly a very large hand), were all Asian elephants. By the end of the Middle Ages, Europeans lacked accurate images even of Asian elephants. This began to change after 1500 with the establishment of direct trade between Western Europe and Southern Asia around the tip of Africa. Within a few years of the opening of that trade, the king of Portugal had enough elephants that he could make gifts of them to the Pope and the Hapsburg emperor. In the second half of the Seventeenth Century, enough Asian elephants had been brought to Europe that non-royals owned them an traveled the countryside showing them to commoners. Dutch merchants, stopping at the Cape of Good Hope on their way to and from Asia were the first to view both kinds of elephants and make comparisons that questioned Polybius. In 1797, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described enough differences between the two types of elephant, especially in their teeth, that he declared them to be different species.

For students of the classics, Blumenbach's identification created a problem. The Cape elephant, on which he based his conclusions, is much larger than any Asian elephant. A possible solution to their problem wasn't long in coming. As Europeans penetrated deeper into Africa, reports began to emerge of a much smaller elephant in the dense central African forests. In 1900, Paul Matschie, a zoologist from Berlin, identified four subspecies of African elephant, with the Cape elephant being the largest and the Central African forest elephant being the smallest. Matschie's samples for his forest elephant were from Cameroon, then a German colony. A few years later, Theodore Noack, based on the study of a zoo elephant in Hanover, identified a pygmy species of elephant from the same area as Matschie's forest elephant. Finally, in 1908, Richard Lydekker, of the British Royal Society, divided African elephants into thirteen sub-species incorporating all four of Matschie's sub-species as well as Noack's pygmy elephant. By the mid Twentieth Century, all of the sub-species were merged back into one species, Loxodonta africana.

Before that could happen, classicists seized the forest elephant as the solution to the Polybius problem. In a series of papers published in the forties and fifties, William Gowers and Howard Scullard argued that the elephants of Ptolemy must have been forest elephants. They further argued that forest elephants at the time inhabited a range that included all of North Africa from Morocco to Ethiopia. This interpretation has also been adopted by military historians, who use the hypothetical population of North African forest elephants to explain the source of Hannibal's famous elephants. Among historians and war gamers, the existence of the North African forest elephant has attained the same level of accepted wisdom as African-elephants-are-smaller-than-Asian-elephants had in the Middle Ages. Yet, I'm aware of no evidence that this is true.

That's not to say there were no elephants in North Africa. Around the year 500 BCE, a Carthaginian named Hanno took a fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the coast of Africa. Halfway down the coast of modern Morocco, he put ashore and commented on the presence of large numbers of elephants. The elephants were part of a population that inhabited the Atlas Mountains, which stretch from the Atlantic across Morocco and northern Algeria. This population was the source of at least part of Hannibal's elephants and continued to exist for at least a century after his time. But were they savanna elephants or forest elephants? Is that even a meaningful distinction?

It turns out, the answer is yes. Though most taxonomies no longer split African elephants into different sub-species after 1960, question still lingered about the forest elephant. The elephants had distinct physical features other than size that distinguished them from other African elephants. Was this no more significant that hair and skin color among humans or did the differences run deeper? With the rise of genetic sequencing technology at the turn of the century it finally became possible to produce a definitive answer. Beginning in 2000, a number of tests showed that the differences were great enough to label the forest elephant an entirely separate species. Hybridization between forest elephants and savanna elephants is possible, but rare. The name chosen for the forest elephant is Loxodonta cyclotis and credit for defining it is given to Matschie's 1900 paper. The genetic sequencing of the forest elephant makes it possible to make a provisional determination about the identity of Hannibal's and Ptolemy's elephants.

As for Hannibal's elephants, no one has done the study yet. Since the Atlas Mountains elephant herds have been extinct for two thousand years, this would require locating some bones and dating them to Hannibal's time. Even when the tests were done, it wouldn't produce a definite answer. While he probably used Atlas elephants for most of those he took on his invasion, it is possible that at least some of them were Asian elephants. His personal elephant was called Sarus, a word that has been translated as possibly meaning "the Syrian" (it could also mean "one tusk" or "Mr. Snuggles" (I made that last one up)).

We're on firmer ground with Ptolemy's elephants. Polybius specifically says they were African elephants, distinguishing them from Antiochus' Asian elephants. We have a second line of evidence to back this up. During Alexander the Great's campaigns in the East, the Greeks came to appreciate the value of War elephants. After his death, his generals and successors, each with their own chunk of the empire, tried to acquire elephants for their armies. Although Ptolemy I gained one of the choicer and easier defended parts of the empire, Egypt, he was cut of from the source of war elephants and was unable to breed his own herd (he likely had no females). According to an insciption found at Adoulis on the Eritrean coast, Ptolemy III bragged that "Troglodytic and Ethiopian elephants, which he and his father were the first to hunt from these lands and, [brought] them back into Egypt, to fit out for military service." Although the geographic term Ethiopia was used to mean all of Black Africa, in this case, it's safe to assume that it meant the the region of Adoulis which was then part of the Kingdom of Axum. Luckily, elephants still exist in the region.

In a place called Gash-Barka, near where the borders of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan come together, a small herd of about 120 elephants has survived. Between 2001 and 2003, a group of scientists collected poop as part of a larger research project into the Gash-Barka herd. One of the leaders of the team was Jeheskel Shoshani who had been one of the primaries on the team that first sequenced forest elephant DNA. Naturally, the team also sequenced DNA of the Gash-Barka elephants recovered from their poop. The results were conclusive: "At every one of the diagnostic sites, savanna elephant-specific nucleotide character states were present; sequences with sites that matched a character state typical of forest elephants were never found." The Gash-Barka elephants are savanna elephants. Furthermore, the Gash-Barka closest affinity was to East African savanna elephants, which are less likely to contain any hybrids than the other group tested, West Central African elephants.

In the discussion section of their paper, the researchers look at the implications for Polybius' account of the Battle of Raphia. The Adoulis inscription only mentions African elephants as the source for the war elephants for Ptolemy IV's father. There is no reason to believe he had replaced them with new, smaller elephants from another source. If the Egyptian elephants were as big, if not bigger, than the Selucid ones, something other than size must have caused them to run away. Maybe they weren't as well trained or experienced as the Selucid elephants. Maybe the Selucid troops knew some trick for fighting elephants that the Egyptians didn't know. Pliny wrote that one of the only things elephants fear is mice. Maybe the Selucids had a battalion of trained combat mice (probably not). Maybe it was just one of those things that happen when armies clash.

There is one final possibility to consider. At the time, there existed a herd of Asian elephants native to Syria. The bones of these elephants show them to have been the largest of Asian elephants. Within a century they would be hunted to extinction for their impressive ivory. Most surviving records of war elephants describe them as having come from India already trained. Quite a few generations passed before Mediterranean kingdoms were able to breed and train their own herds of war elephants. It is remotely possible that Antiochus' elephant handlers had managed to capture and train some Syrian elephants. If Ptolemy's elephants were bigger than average Indian elephants, the use of Syrian elephants raises the possibility that Antiochus' elephants could have matched them in size.

The Gash-Barka study puts to rest one part of the theory of the North African forest elephant. Elephants in Northeast Africa today are, and almost certainly in antiquity were, savanna elephants. In Northwest Africa, the species used as war elephants remains in question. But, it's a question that can potentially be answered in the near future. The study also shows how fields of science, supposedly far removed from the humanities, can find unexpected relevance there.

In its way, this is an argument for a traditional liberal arts education. If genetics was taught as nothing more than a vocational skill, it would have been far less likely that anyone on the Gash-Barka team would have made the connection between their project and the writings of a second century BCE historian. A liberal arts education brings remote fields of knowledge together and makes them all relevant to the human experience. Who could have said in advance that collecting a few piles of elephant poop would produce knowledge relevant to genetics, conservation, history, and the classics? I'm a strong believer that no knowledge is ever completely useless. I hope this advances my case.

Afterward: The Gash-Barka genetics study in the current issue of the Journal of Heredity
is the fifth report on that project. In May 2008, Jeheskel Shoshani was killed in a terrorist bombing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With permission from his daughter, the team will continue to list him as a co-author on reports from the study.

Baron Longueuil and the mastodon of 1739

The most important early discovery of mastodon bones happened in 1739 at a place called (in a gift to thirteen year old boys everywhere) Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, just a few miles downstream from the present-day location of Ken Ham's ridiculous creationism museum in Covington. This was not the first European discovery of mastodon bones, but it was the first to receive serious scientific attention in the Old World. The story is simple enough. In 1739, a small French army accompanied by their Indian allies traveled from Quebec to Louisiana to make war on the Chickasaw Indians. Their route took them down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to a place near modern-day Memphis where they were to meet a second army coming up from New Orleans. Half-way down the Ohio, they camped at the mouth of a small stream. Some ways up stream, they found some large bones. They collected a few of the bones and, after the campaign, sent them to Paris. This story has been repeated, embellished, corrupted, and deconstructed for almost three centuries. Using some documents that have been largely ignored till now, I hope to clear up a couple of points and contribute my own version of the discovery and of how word of the discovery was communicated to the outside, literate world.

First, some history

The French and British adopted different strategies to exploit North America. The British settled the East Coast and moved west. The French settled in the St. Lawrence valley and moved to occupy the interior of the continent through its waterways. Rather late in the game they moved to add the huge Mississippi drainage to their claim on the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes drainage. When Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, tried to exert actual French power up the Mississippi he found his way blocked by the Chickasaw nation who were settled between modern Natchez and Mobile and ranged over a much larger area east of the river. The Chickasaw already had an already established an overland trade relationship with British merchants from the Carolinas. After several years of raids and counter-raids, Bienville decided to end the Chickasaw problem once and for all. In 1736, he raised an army in New Orleans which was to coordinate its attack on the Chickasaw's villages with a second army sent from the Illinois country. The Chickasaw separately defeated both armies. Not deterred (or perhaps desperate for his career) Bienville wrote to Paris for support. Paris gave him everything he wanted. The government sent cannons, mortars, grenades, thousands of pounds of powder and shot, and five hundred troops. They also ordered another, larger army to be raised in Quebec to advance from the north under the command of Bienville's nephew, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil. It was this expedition that collected the bones at Big Bone Lick.

The campaign against the Chickasaw was another failure. The cannons got stuck in the mud, draught animals died, the French soldiers got sick, draftees deserted, and the Iroquois, who made up half of Longueuil's army, made a separate peace with the Chickasaw after exchanging gifts of cheese and pottery. In early summer 1740, Bienville called off the campaign. He and Longueuil released their troops to go home. As long as they were in North America, the French never did manage to defeat the Chickasaw. Longueuil sailed down the Mississippi to New Orleans with his uncle. From there, he took a ship back to France. In Paris, he donated the bones to the Cabinet du Roi (the museum of the King).

Now, some historiography

The story was retold several times over the following two centuries. By the early Twentieth Century, huge differences existed among the stories. Three different years for the discovery were being put forth. Three different versions of the actual discovery and collection of the bones existed. Some publications included a beautiful etching of a mastodon tooth. In some versions, an officer known only as Fabri or Fabry was present at the discovery, might have returned there in the late forties, and either met or wrote a letter to the Comte du Buffon in 1748 giving a short description of the native legends surrounding the bones. Another mysterious Frenchman known as Hamel or du Hamel seems to have known something about the circumstances of the discovery.

In the English language, the most important attempt to make sense of the various versions came in 1942. This was made by the most influential American paleontologist of his generation, George Gaylord Simpson. He wrote two articles on the subject. This version comes from "The Beginnings of Vertebrate Paleontology in North America," published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society where he wrote: 

In 1739 Longueuil was placed in command of French and Indian troops dispatched from Canada to aid Le Moyne de Bienville, founder and governor of New Orleans, in an attack on the Chickasaw Indians. ... The expedition left Montreal in June, 1739, and proceeded to the Ohio River by way of Oswego, Lake Chautauqua, and the Allegheny River. In late summer of that year they descended the Ohio and at some distance before reaching the falls, where Louisville now stands, they found a marsh on the edge of which were large bones and teeth, representing what they took to be the remains of three elephants. Longueuil had some of these remains gathered up, including a tusk, a femur, and at least three molars, and these were carried with the army to its rendezvous with Bienville, on the Mississippi near the present site of Memphis.
 After the successful conclusion of the Chickasaw war in the spring of 1740, Longueuil went on to New Orleans, taking the fossils with him, and hence transported them to France at about the end of 1740. The fossils were placed in the King's collection of curiosities, Cabinet du Roi, whence they were transferred to the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes....

I'll address six questions here.

• When were the bones found?
• Who found the bones?
• How were the bones added to the royal collections?
• Is that etching really one of the teeth?
• Who is du Hamel?
• Who is Fabri?

 Other writers have answered some of these questions. My purpose here is not to claim their work as my own. My goal is to bring their research together with my own to create what I hope is the most accurate version.

The questions

When were the bones found? The first published mention of the bones is on a map entitled "Carte de la Louisiane Cours du Mississipi et Pais Voisins [Map of Louisiana, the Course of the Mississippi, and Neighbouring Countries]." It is dated 1744 and was prepared by "N. Bellin" (Jacques-Nicolas Bellin 1703-1772). Halfway down the "Oyo ou la Belle Riviere" is the notation "Endroit ou on à trouvé des os d'Elephant en 1729 [The place where Elephants' bones were found in 1729]." In 1756, Jean-Bernard Bossu ascended the Mississippi and wrote a series of letters to a friend in France. While stopping at a fort on the Illinois River, he was shown a giant molar. The commandant would not let him go to the place, because of the danger posed by the British, but told him the story behind the tooth: "In 1735, Canadians, who came to make war with Chickasaws, found around the Belle River or the Ohio, the skeletons of seven elephants, which makes me assume that Louisiana is in India..."

Which date is correct: 1729, 1735, or 1739? There is no doubt that 1739 is the correct date. The 1729 date is simply a mistake by the mapmaker. Bellin's source for that part of the map was a manuscript map drawn by Philippe Mandeville who, in turn, used information gathered Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery, an officer with Longueuil. On Mandeville's map, "Endroit o yl a Ett trouv Les Eaux de plusieurs Elephans pard L arme de Cannada Command pard Mr. Le Baron de Longuille et o il a fait mettre Les Armes du Roy en 1739. [Place where the bones of many elephants were found by the army from Canada commanded by the Baron de Longuille, and where he had the Arms of the King set up in 1739]." The 3 in the date is smudged and hard to read. Sylvester Stevens and Donald Kent demonstrated this through the elegantly simple method of giving a skilled draftsman Mandeville's drawing and asking him to produce a map. The resulting map also had the date 1729. Bossu's date is based on the fact that, as mentioned above, the French waged two wars against the Chickasaw Nation. Longueuil's 1739 expedition down the Ohio was during the second of these campaigns. During the earlier war, Pierre D'Artaguiette led a force from the Illinois country during the winter of 1735-6. He never passed by Big Bone Lick.

Bellin's 1744 map incorrectly dating the discovery to 1729. Source.

Who found the bones? This one is both easy and hard to answer. At various times it has been claimed that the French found the bones, that their Indian allies found the bones, or that the Indians told the French about the bones after which the French went to the spot and collected them. Simpson says "they" found them, referring to the whole army, and Longueuil ordered the bones collected. There are no surviving records of the discovery written by Longueuil. There aren't even references by French scientists that such a report ever existed. There is, however a note from the mysterious Fabry. It reads in its entirety: "Baron de Longueuil left Canada with a large party of French and Indians to come and join M. de Bienville on the Mississippi at an appropriate location to assemble and march against the Chickasaw Indians. M. Longueuil, instead of taking the usual route through Detroit [to the Illinois River], portaged five leagues from Lake Erie, and went down the Ohio River by canoe to its juncture with the Mississippi, thirty-five leagues above the Illinois. When he was nearly halfway down the Ohio River, a few Indians who had gone hunting from their camp found the remains of three large animals on the edge of a swamp. They brought back to the camp a thigh bone and tusks that are believed to be from an elephant, and that M. de Longueuil brought to France in 1740. M. Lignery, Lieutenant in Canada, who was with M. Longueuil, wrote a Journal of the campaign, in which he detailed the discovery of bones in question." Fabry is not is very clear and to the point. The bones were found by an Indian hunting party and brought to the French. There is no mention of the French going to site or doing any collecting, though the mysterious du Hamel (below) gives me reason to think they did. Presented with mysterious giant bones, wouldn't you have gone and taken a look?

"Indians" is a pretty vague term. Is it possible to narrow that down a bit? In her book, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Adrienne Mayor attempts to do just that. Longueuil's force was made up 442 men. Of these, 123 were French and Canadian and 319 were from allied Indian nations. According to Mayor, the nations living in the area where Longueuil would have been recruiting that were most likely to join him were the Iroquois, Wyandot, and Abenaki. Of these, she believes the Abenaki are the most likely discoverers. Many of them were Christians and spoke French, making them more attuned to know what might interest the French. The Abenaki also had a history of joining French expeditions and, thus might have been familiar with the attractions of lands outside their home territory. Mayor is comfortable enough in this conclusion that, after laying out her reasons, she refers to the discoverers as Abenaki for the rest of her book. Based on the information available to her, it's a solid conclusion. I've had no reason to question it since I first read her book six years ago.

That is, until last fall when, while writing my chapter about the mastodon, I came across a set of documents from the campaign. In 1922, the Archivist of Quebec published these documents in the annual report of the Archives. One of the documents is the roster of the army that departed Montreal and two others are reports from Longueuil while on the road. Unfortunately, both of the reports were written before he reached Big Bone Lick and do not describe the discovery. The roster names all of the officers and cadets who traveled with him and breaks down the rest of the army into soldiers, draftees, and Indian allies by nation. The latter are: 237 Iroquois, 50 Abenaki, and 32 Algonquin and Nippising. That's still a reasonable number of Abenaki. Let's move on to Longueuil's two reports. By August 4, the army had made their way up the St. Lawrence River, crossed Lake Ontario, portaged around Niagara Falls and made their way to the point where they were to portage over to the Ohio drainage. In this report he says that a large part ("une grand partie") of the Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois deserted when they were passing the English settlement at Oswego, New York, seduced by English brandy. He put the total at around seventy, but hoped they could be replaced with other Iroquois recruited in the Ohio country. Six days later, having completed the portage into the Ohio basin, he wrote that the actual number of deserters was closer to ninety. The Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois contingents of his army amounted to 101 men.

It's not likely that there were enough Abenaki left to make up a hunting party large enough to feed 350 men. But, if not the Abenaki, then who? Longueuil wrote that he hoped to recruit more Iroquois in the valley. None of the records I'm aware of say whether he was successful in that or not. However, there is a piece of evidence that indicates who he did recruit. In 1749, ten years after Longueuil passed through, competition between the British and French to be the dominant influence in the Ohio country was heating up. It would soon flare into the open warfare that Bossu was warned to avoid. In that year, the French sent Jean Baptiste Celoron de Blainville down the Ohio to convince the local Indians to stick with the French. For some reason, Anglo historians prefer to ignore his title and call him Celoron. That might be because he was kind of a jerk. Celoron was a veteran of the Chickasaw wars who, then, had brought his own contingent of French and Indians from the Illinois country. Celoron's style on this mission was to scold the heads of the villages he passed and then hand out gifts. His final stop was a large Shawnee settlement at the mouth of the Scioto River. He estimated the settlement as having 80-100 households. Celoron's welcome was underwhelming. First the Shawnee tried to scare him off with a show of arms (which Celoron dryly notes were probably provided by the British). Next, they erected fortifications around the village. When they finally allowed Celoron in to address them, he scolded them for their bad hospitality. He demanded to know what had happened to the good will they had when, "ten years ago, Monsieur de Longueil (sic) passed by here on his way to the Chuachias [Chickasaws]. You came out to meet him, and you showed him in every way the kindness of your hearts. A company of young men also volunteered to accompany him."

This, I think, is the true identity of the discoverers. The Shawnee settlement at the mouth of the Scioto was about 130 miles upstream from the Big Bone Lick and the lick was known to the Shawnee along the Ohio. In the summer of 1755, a group of Shawnee warriors attacked the small settlement of Draper's Meadow in western Virginia. Several settlers were killed and five were taken prisoner. One of the prisoners was Mary Draper Ingles. Ingles was taken west to an encampment of French and Shawnee just above mouth of the Bone Lick stream. She was then taken to the salt lick and put to work boiling water to collect salt. Her later escape and journey back to Virginia has been retold by historians, novelized, and made into more than one movie. Her story shows that in 1755, sixteen years after Longueuil passed, the lick was well known to the Shawnee.

There is one final question about the discoverers that has been insufficiently examined. What was the motivation of the hunters in bringing the bones to the camp? In the narrative that assumes the hunters had no previous knowledge of the bones, the logical course of events is that the found a salt lick, which is a place where buffalo and deer would gather, then hunkered down, waiting for the game to come to them. During this period of quiet observation, they saw the bones and decided to bring them back to the camp. Why? They thought the French would be interested in them. In the narrative that assumes the hunters did have previous knowledge of the bones, the logical course of events is that some of them went directly to the salt lick to collect bones, while the rest of the party hunted. In either case, why did they bring them back? This is a good question. If they had joined the expedition a few days earlier, as I believe, their motive might have been as much to impress the other Indians as it was to give the French something they might be interested in. Maybe more so. How ethnocentric is it for Euro-Americans to assume that we were the intended audience for the bones? Their retrieval might have been motivated by the newest members of the expedition trying to impress everyone in the expedition, not just the French.

How were the bones added to the royal collections? Most accounts are very specific that the bones were donated directly to the museum. Those bones were one femur, one broken tusk, and three molars. The note from the mysterious Fabry, quoted above, mentions only a femur and tusks (plural). Fabry's note appears twice in the literature of the time, both by the same writer: Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Daubenton was hired by Buffon in 1742 to assist him in writing his massive encyclopedia of nature, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, and to catalog the various royal collections. In 1762, Buffon began working on the volume his history that included the elephant. That same year, presumably as a result of his research for Buffon, Daubenton presented a paper to the French academy about the bones discovered on the Ohio. In this paper he only indirectly tells the story of their discovery: "Baron de Longueuil going out of Lake Erie in 1739 with a large party of French & Indians, went down the river Oyo on his canoes up to where it joins the Mississippi, thirty-five miles below the Illinois: while they were camped halfway down the Oyo, some Indians out hunting, found the bones of three large animals on the edge of a swamp, and brought to camp the femur in question and tusks that they [presumably the French] thought came from an elephant, and that M. de Longueuil brought to France in 1740." This is a paraphrasing of the note from someone he identifies only as Fabry. Later he writes that "M. du Hamel, of the Academy, told me that M. de Longueuil had brought from Canada very large molars, these are in the Royal collection."

Daubenton concluded that the teeth and the tusk and femur came from two different animals. The former he determined were from a relative of the hippo and the latter from a relative of the elephant. In Buffon's Natural History the sections on each of those animals include Daubenton's inventory of the royal collections. True to his earlier conclusions, Daubenton describes the femur and tusk with the elephant and the three teeth with the hippopotamus. In the inventory entry for the femur, he gives the full text of Fabry's note. Just as before, this is followed by the statement that "M. Hamel, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, said that Mr. Longueuil also brought in 1740, very-large molars that had been found in Canada, perhaps along with the tusk and femur [singular] I have just mentioned." In the next volume, in the section on the hippo, he says the three teeth came from Canada with the femur and tusk. Daubenton's three entries agree with each other in the most important details. These are: Fabry says the bones were discovered by an Indian hunting party and that they brought a femur and tusks to the camp, there is only one tusk in the collections delivered by Longueuil, and that he learned about the teeth from du Hamel (or Hamel), not from Fabry or Longueuil.

Is that etching really one of the teeth? In 1752, a Swiss geologist, Jean Etienne Guettard, presented a paper before the French Academy. The topic was a comparison of the geology of Switzerland and North America. Guettard included a short section on the fossils of North America. In it he writes, "I should have so much desired to compare a large fossil tooth that is place that is marked on maps of Canada as the canton where elephant bones are found. What animal is it? And does it resemble fossil teeth of this size that we have found in different parts of Europe? [i.e. mammoths]. I give this figure; the research we do on it later should shed some light on the subject." The maps he refers to can only mean Bellin's, which had been published twice by then. When his paper was published four years after its initial presentation, it included two plates of a giant tooth and a small Crinoid fossil. Every published example of the etching that I've seen, except one, identifies it as one of the teeth Longueuil donated.

Guettard's tooth. He identifies the small crinoid fossil on the lower left as a moth. Source.

There are some good reasons to doubt that. First, Guettard never mentions Longueuil or the royal collections. Second, he says he would like to examine a tooth, not that he already has examined one. I suspect the image was something he added to his paper before publication in 1756. Third, the tooth doesn't match any of the descriptions Daubention gave for the teeth. I'm not the only person who has had doubts about the illustration. In 2002, Pascal Tassy went through the fossil collection at the Museum trying to identify Longueuil's bones. In the 260 years since their donation, the bones were cataloged three times and given different numbers each time. Old numbers rubbed away, tags fell off, and the collections were moved several times. But, Tassy was successful and located all three teeth with traces of their Daubenton numbers visible using a black light. He also located the tooth in Guettard's illustration. After some detective work, he was able to match the tooth to a number in an 1861 inventory with the notation "Collection Drée." From here, he was able to find an illustration of the tooth and a reference to Drée in Georges Cuvier's Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles (1806). When Buffon published an illustration of teeth from the Ohio in 1778 and this tooth was not one of them.

Guettard gives one possible clue as to the origin of the tooth. In the published version of his paper, he says that Jean François Gautier, a prominent Canadian naturalist, sent him a note commenting on his draft. Gautier wrote, "All those who have been to this place, who have seen the skeletons or bones of these animals, relate that the skeletons are almost complete: we do not assume that they include the teeth, because these are the only parts that we can easily carry away; the other bones are too large and too heavy." Gautier adds that he will have Father Bonnecamp, a Jesuit of impeccable scientific credentials, make drawings of the skeletons during his next trip down the Ohio. Bonnecamp was part of Celoron's 1749 expedition. He never made a second expedition down the Ohio, but Gautier's interest in the bones might have led one of the men to acquire one of the teeth from another traveler.

The likely history of the tooth is that Gautier acquired it sometime before 1756 and sent it to one of his scientific correspondents in France, possibly even Guettard. The tooth was in private collections until some point between 1778 and 1806 when it was either donated to the Museum or confiscated by the revolutionary authorities.

Who is du Hamel? This is the easiest question to answer. Daubenton describes du Hamel as being "of the Royal Academy of Sciences." This makes him Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau who was elected to the Academy in 1738 and served three times as its president. That he knew about the teeth, which are not mentioned in Fabry's letter, raises the possibility that he was present when Longueuil donated them. Like Guettard, Duhamel was a regular correspondent of Gautier's, which makes him another possible recipient of the fourth tooth.

Who is Fabri? Stanley Hedeen, in his book Big Bone Lick, refers to "A Frenchman by the name of Fabri [who] was likely at the Lick in the 1740s when he saw 'heads and skeletons of an enormous quadruped called by the Savages, the father of oxen.'" Mayor writes, "Little is known about Fabri except that he participated in the campaign from Montreal down the Ohio and on to New Orleans..."  Hedeen cites no source; Mayor cites Cuvier and Henry Chapman Mercer's The Lenape Stone (1885). Mercer writes that the tradition that the bones were those of a monster "appears in the song tradition of the ‘Father of Oxen,’ from Canada, and in a monster tradition from Louisiana, both spoken of by Fabri, a French officer, in a letter to Buffon from America in 1748." Cuvier mentions Fabri twice. His first reference reads: "We have three such [teeth] at the Museum, previously brought back by Fabri." He refers to Daubenton's catalog as his source. The second reference reads: "A French officer named Fabri announced to Buffon in 1748 that the Indians looked upon these bones scattered in various parts of Canada and Louisiana as coming from a particular animal they called the father of oxen." For this he cites Buffon (1778) as his source. What Buffon wrote was, "In the year 1748, M. Fabri, who had made great excursions into the northern parts of Louisiana and the southern regions Canada, informed me that he had seen heads and skeletons of an enormous quadruped, called by the Savages the father of Oxen."

Except for Duhamel's mention of the teeth, everything we know about the discovery of the mastodon bones at Big Bone Lick comes from Fabry/Fabri. And, all the information we have about Fabri ultimately comes from Buffon and Daubenton. Daubenton, who wrote first, quotes the note describing the discovery and says that it was written by M. Fabry, as he spells it. In the note, Fabry does not say he was present at the discovery; he refers Daubenton to Lieutenant Lignery for details of the discovery. In my reading, by referring to Lignery's journal for more information, it seems likely that Fabri was not at Big Bone Lick and that Lignery was his source of information. Buffon, writing sixteen years after Daubenton, says Fabri, was a great traveler who saw the "heads and skeletons of an enormous quadruped." Buffon makes no mention of Longueuil. Buffon gives us one solid detail that might help identify Fabri. He met him personally in 1748.

Looking at the roster of officers who left Montreal with Longueuil, I find no mention of a Fabri, Fabry, or any other variant spelling. I do, however find Lignery. François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery (or Ligneris), a major, not a lieutenant, was later an important commander in the frontier wars with the British.

We haven't reached a dead end on Fabri. I finally located Fabri in the online Dictionary of Louisiana Biography put out by the Louisiana Historical Association. He is André Fabry de la Bruyère, the secretary to Longueuil's uncle, Governor Bienville. Fabry participated in both Chickasaw campaigns as part of the New Orleans contingents. He was an explorer who tried to establish a trade route between New Orleans and Santa Fe. He was also in Paris for most of the years 1747 and 1748 when Buffon mentions meeting him.

The sources

After eliminating secondary retellings, I believe these are the most dependable sources to use in reconstructing the story of the bones' discovery and final fate.

Fabry's note as quoted by Daubenton in Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 11, 1764.

Buffon's memory of the conversation with Fabry in 1748 recounted in Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, contenant les epoques de la nature, supplement vol. 6, 1778.

The campaign roster, and two letters of Gilles Hocquart, the intendant of Canada, repeating Longueuil's letters of August 6 and 10 found in Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec, 1922.

Celoron's speech scolding the Shawnee from his journal in Galbreath, C.B. ed. Expedition of Celoron to the Ohio Country in 1749, 1920.

Daubenton's descriptions and analyses of the bones and teeth in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique & de physique, 1762 (pub. 1764); Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 11, 1764; and Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 12, 1764.

The analysis of Mandeville's map in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds. The Expedition of Baron de Longueuil, 1941.

The rediscovery of the bones by Tassy in "L’émergence du concept d’espèce fossile: Le mastodonte américain (Proboscidea, Mammalia) entre clarté et confusion." Geodiversitas 24, 2002.

The best source possible for the discovery would be Lignery's journal, but I have been unable to find any trace of it. A later journal of his is in the Canadian archives, but not this one.

My version

Leaving out all of my historian's probablys, it-is-likelys, and it's-safe-to-assumes, this is how I reconstruct the events as a story.

By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, France was established in the drainage area of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes. Some of their agents had even portaged from Lake Michigan into the Illinois River valley and established trading posts there. The next stage of their American expansion was from their Caribbean colonies to the Gulf coast and Mississippi Delta from whence the claimed the entire drainage area of the Mississippi River. In the 1720s, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the founder and governor of New Orleans, began expanding French influence up the river with the goal of hooking up with the French in the Illinois country and, ultimately, with Quebec. Making such a connection was not just to the economic advantage of the colonies; it was an important move in the geopolitical Great Game being played by France and Britain for control of the continent. Connecting the two colonies would contain the British on the East Coast giving the French a chance to monopolize everything north a New Spain (Mexico).

At first the plan went well. The settlements at Baton Rouge and Natchez were established a few years after New Orleans and good relations were established with the Choctaw nation. However, above Natchez, their expansion was halted, first by the Natchez nation and then by the Chickasaw. Both of these nations already had established trade relations with the British out of the Carolinas. When attempts to lure the Natchez into the French orbit failed, they resorted to force. By 1731, the French had destroyed or scattered the Natchez. The Chickasaw proved to be a more difficult problem. In 1735, Bienville gave up on negotiations and decided that, once again, war was the only way to deal with his intransigent neighbors. A great campaign was planned for the spring of the next year. The plan was a simple one: one army would come down the Mississippi from the Illinois country while a second would come from New Orleans overland through modern Alabama and they would crush the Chickasaw between them. The actual campaign was a miserable failure. The two armies failed to coordinate their actions and the Chickasaw defeated them one at a time inflicting a great number of casualties on the French. Bienville returned to New Orleans to plan another campaign.

Bienville began his second campaign in the summer of 1739. This time, the New Orleans force was reinforced with troops from France, artillery, and siege weapons. A second force, under Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville, was to come down from the Illinois country while a third, commanded by Bienville's nephew, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, was to come down from Quebec. Longueuil's force was made up of 123 French and Canadian and 319 from allied Indian nations (186 de Sault Iroquois, 51 Two Mountains Iroquois, 32 Algonquin and Nipissing, and 50 Abenaki). Their planned route was to be almost entirely by water up the St. Lawrence, across Lake Ontario, a portage around Niagara Falls, across Lake Erie to a place where they could portage into the headwaters of the Ohio River, and down that river to the Mississippi. This route allowed the expedition to perform a second service to the authorities in Montreal and New Orleans. The Ohio River was barely known to the French. By following this shorter route, Longueuil was able to assess whether it was superior to the established route through the Great Lakes and over the Chicago portage into the Illinois River. For this purpose he was provided with a young surveyor, Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery.

The expedition left Montreal in two detachments on June 16 and 30 by birch bark canoe. On August 4, they reached the place where they were to make their portage to Lake Chautauqua on the headwaters of the Ohio. Before making the portage, Longueuil sent a progress report to the governor in Montreal, the Marquis de Beauharnais. In this report he says that a large part ("une grand partie") of the Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois deserted when they were passing the English settlement at Oswego, New York, seduced by English brandy. He estimated their number at about 70. A week later, having completed the portage he sent a second report to Beauharnais estimating the number of deserters at 90. He hoped to make up for the desertions by recruiting more Iroquois along the way. There is no record that he had any success with the Iroquois, but he did recruit a number of Shawnee at Scioto Village.

One hundred thirty miles downstream from Scioto Village, the expedition made camp at the mouth of a creek on the southern bank of the river. De Lery noted on his map of the Ohio River that Longueuil made a formal showing of the Arms of the King, claiming the land. De Lery called their camp, "[The] place where the bones of many elephants were found." The bones were those of the American mastodon. One of the officers, Major François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, wrote in his journal the circumstances of how these bones were found. A party of Shawnee, who were familiar with the country, went hunting to reprovision the army. Somewhat later, come of them returned bringing with them giant tusks and a femur that the French officers identified as coming from an elephant. The hunters said that there were three skeletons of this animal in a salt lick not far from the camp. A group of officers went to look at the site and collected some more bones as souvenirs. Longueuil collected three teeth. The bones, tusks, and teeth were added to Longueuil's baggage and the army continued on their way to their rendezvous with the armies of Celoron and Bienville, which they made at the end of November.

The campaign against the Chickasaw was no more successful than the previous one. This time, rather than defeating the French in battle, the Chickasaw wore them down by refusing to engage them. By the summer of 1740, almost 500 French troops had been felled by disease and most of their Indian auxiliaries had abandoned them. Bienville called off the campaign and released the armies—at least, that part that hadn't already deserted—to go home. Longueuil joined his uncle and escorted the sick soldiers downriver to New Orleans. The bones from the Ohio were not a secret. Longueuil's officers told Bienville’s officers about them and maybe showed off their own souvenirs. One conversation that we know for sure happened was between Lignery and Bienville’s secretary, André Fabry de la Bruyère. Lignery referred to his journal while telling the story. We’re lucky that he did talk to Fabry because the journal has not survived.

Longueuil returned to France in the fall with the bones and teeth where he donated them to the Cabinet du Roi (the museum of the King). At the time of their donation, the bones failed to attract much attention. Academy member Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau was the only French scientist who was aware of the donation at the time. It is from him that we know of the three teeth that were donated along with the tusk and femur. It's curious that Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the new director of the Jardin des Plantes, which included the Cabinet only learned about the donation when Fabry spent the winter in Paris in 1747-8. Fabry wrote a short note describing the discovery as he heard it from Lignery and orally told Buffon about legends along the Mississippi calling the skeletons the father of buffalo ("le pere aux beufs" which translates literally as "the father of oxen"). Buffon's ignorance of the discovery is doubly curious considering word of the discovery had been published twice by then on maps using de Lery's survey of the Ohio River. New maps of unexplored parts of the world were not trivial matters at the time.

In the spring of 1748, around the same time that he met Fabry, Buffon published the first volume of his encyclopedic Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. The project would eventually run to thirty-six volumes and occupy the rest of his life. Buffon’s assistant at the Jardin, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, helped with the project by writing an inventory of related items in the Cabinet for each chapter Buffon wrote. It wasn't until the early sixties that they got around to the chapters they deemed relevant to the Ohio bones and teeth. On examining them, Daubenton found them interesting enough that he wrote a major paper on them, which he presented to the Academy in August 1762. Daubenton compared the bones and teeth to those of an Asian elephant that had once been part of the king’s menagerie and to mammoth bones that Joseph-Nicolas Delisle had brought from Russia in 1747. Daubenton's conclusion was that all three sets of bones represented a single species and that the differences between them were attributable to age and sex. For the teeth, he came up with a different conclusion. The Ohio teeth in no way resembled the mammoth or elephant teeth in the royal collection. After some study of other teeth in the collection, he decided they most resembled those of a hippopotamus—a giant, carnivorous hippopotamus.

Daubenton’s paper and the volumes of Buffon's Natural History dealing with elephants and hippos were all published in 1764. Had they studied the Ohio bones and teeth earlier, their publications would have had much greater influence than they did. But, during the years between Longueuil depositing them and Daubenton writing about them, the bones and teeth of the Ohio came to the attention of other learned Europeans. The British learned about the lick and its bones as early as 1744 when Robert Smith opened a trading post on the Great Miami River, which debouches into the Ohio a few miles above the salt lick. In 1751, he gave two teeth to surveyor Christopher Gist. All through the fifties, other merchants and travelers brought back teeth and stories. Important men in Philadelphia, New York, and London heard these stories and received teeth as gifts. At some point between 1752 and 1756, a Swiss member of the Academy, Jean Etienne Guettard, learned about the teeth and the lick and had a detailed engraving of a tooth made. The tooth was not one of Longueuil's. The Academy published the engraving in its journal.

Longueuil was not the first European to encounter fossils of unknown mammals and realize that they were something worthy of comment. That distinction goes to Cortez and his officers in 1519 when they were shown the femur of a relative of the mastodon by Tlaxcalan elders. They took the bone and sent it to the king of Spain. Nor do Europeans deserve credit for realizing that they were something worthy of comment. That distinction goes to the Native Americans of North, South and Central America who showed them to the Europeans. The importance of Longueuil's recognition and collection is that these were the first bones of large vertebrates from the New World to be carefully studied and written about. Guettard made only a short mention of his tooth in a paper on the geology of Canada making the comment that he would like to know more about it. The British passed teeth and bones round and discussed them in letters, but no one made a detailed study of them for publication until several years after Daubenton's three articles came out.

In 1942, the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson made a point of dismissing the interest of Native Americans in the bones they encountered and wrote that Longueuil's moment at Big Bone Lick was the beginning of North American vertebrate paleontology. Simpson’s point is valid only if we speak specifically of the European scientific discipline of paleontology. Regardless of how many qualifications are applied to it, there is no denying that the collection of the Big Bone Lick mastodon fossils and donation to the Cabinet du Roi was an important milestone on the road to understanding extinct proboscideans.

Note: I wrote a big sloppy version of the first part of this post last fall while trying to figure out the sequence of events for the mastodon chapter of my book. Last week Adrienne Mayor posted a short essay on Cuvier and the mastodon that made a brief mention of the 1739 discovery. This inspired me to whack my historiographical notes into a coherent (I hope) post. While doing so, I noticed a few points that I missed last time and am making appropriate corrections to the chapter.