Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Bobebam here. As much as paleontology is about revealing
Speaker 1: the stories of creatures that lived long ago, it also
Speaker 1: tells the stories of the scientific process and progress and
Speaker 1: biases of the time in which it's conducted. We've talked
Speaker 1: a bit about this before on the show, in episodes
Speaker 1: about specific dinosaurs or about paleo art. You can track
Speaker 1: science's concept of what a dinosaur even is through depictions
Speaker 1: of say, a Terranosaurus rex, from the lizard like and
Speaker 1: shrink wrapped images of the past to the birdlike and
Speaker 1: dad bad depictions of today. Along similar lines, you can
Speaker 1: track science's concepts of extinction and evolution through dealings with
Speaker 1: mastodon fossils throughout the seventeen hundreds, and one of the
Speaker 1: United States founders, Thomas Jefferson, used them to defend the
Speaker 1: very honor of his emerging country. But okay, let's step
Speaker 1: way back. During the Last Ice Age, what's now Boone
Speaker 1: County in northern Kentucky was a swampy wetland teeming with
Speaker 1: mega animals. On the ground lay exposed deposits of salt
Speaker 1: or salt licks that attracted herbivores in need of sodium supplements.
Speaker 1: Predators such as humans grew wise to this and ambushed
Speaker 1: careless animals at the licks. The swamps were not safe
Speaker 1: loitering places overall, Every so often creatures that came to
Speaker 1: eat the salt or each other got stuck in the
Speaker 1: mud and died. Radiometric dating tells us that the earliest
Speaker 1: victims perished there just over eighteen thousand years ago. Time
Speaker 1: turned the region into a graveyard, a mass burial site
Speaker 1: loaded with fossilized bones along the Ohio River Valley. Some
Speaker 1: were left behind by species that still exist today, like cariboo.
Speaker 1: Others represent mastodons, ground sloths, and other extinct giants. The
Speaker 1: first Europeans to learn of the Ohio River's amazing bone
Speaker 1: bed were members of a French military expedition led by
Speaker 1: Charles the third le Moin de Longue. When his party
Speaker 1: visited the area in seventeen thirty nine, the native Abenaki
Speaker 1: guides who hunted for them found some fossilized tusks, a
Speaker 1: few teeth, and one femur as big as a person.
Speaker 1: Thanks to these colossal fossils, the area became known as
Speaker 1: Big bone Lick. It still goes by that name today.
Speaker 1: LEMOUI sent these specimens to King Louis the fifteenth in Paris.
Speaker 1: Elephant like fossils were of some interest to Europeans at
Speaker 1: the time, due to other finds earlier in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: no one really knew what to make of them. A
Speaker 1: tooth and other bones found in the Hudson River Valley
Speaker 1: in New York in seventeen oh five were speculated to
Speaker 1: be from an ancient giant humanoid with ribs like rafters.
Speaker 1: It was only in the seventeen twenties that European naturalists
Speaker 1: identified teeth and tusks found in Siberia, Italy and the
Speaker 1: British Isles as being from some kind of elephant like species,
Speaker 1: though their best guess was that the bones were those
Speaker 1: of everyday elephants washed there from southern climes during the
Speaker 1: Biblical Great Flood. Parisian naturalists identified the big Bone Lick
Speaker 1: fossils as being more of the same. Today, we know
Speaker 1: that the Ohio River's bones belonged to the American mastodon,
Speaker 1: a taxonomical name Mammet americanum. The Siberian, Italian, and British
Speaker 1: bones and ones that would be found later in the
Speaker 1: American West were from various species of mammoths, which are
Speaker 1: related to mastodons, but in a separate genus anyway. Traders
Speaker 1: and land surveyors collected additional fossils at Big Bone Lick
Speaker 1: in these seventeen fifties and sixties. Scholars were especially intrigued
Speaker 1: by the huge molars coming out of the site. The
Speaker 1: biggest weighed more than six pounds or around three kilows,
Speaker 1: and all of them had knobby cone shaped cups. The
Speaker 1: modern consensus is that mastadons used these two too tough vegetation,
Speaker 1: but in the eighteenth century many envisioned a different diet,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't just the molars. Some naturalists thought that
Speaker 1: the animal's tusks would have curved downward like saber teeth,
Speaker 1: and some mistook the claws of ground slots as belonging
Speaker 1: to mastodons. When Benjamin Franklin received a box of mastodon fossils,
Speaker 1: he wrote a quote, The tusks agree with those of
Speaker 1: the African and Asiatic elephant, but the grinders differ, being
Speaker 1: full knobs like the grinders of a carnivorous animal. They
Speaker 1: thought the mastodon was a colossal flesh eating monster. A
Speaker 1: mast wound up getting their name because of these molars,
Speaker 1: which it turned out, differed from the flatter teeth of mammoths.
Speaker 1: But at the time this mysterious monster was called incognitum,
Speaker 1: which is basically Latin for we don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the fossils of the Ohio River,
Speaker 1: partially because he was really into the study of nature,
Speaker 1: but partially because he could use the incognitium to refute
Speaker 1: a widely circulated argument about the inherent inferiority of the
Speaker 1: so called New World. Okay, In seventeen sixty six, the
Speaker 1: French naturalist Georges Louis the Clerk de Befolme published his
Speaker 1: theory of American Degeneracy. Buffoon wondered why creatures of the
Speaker 1: Americas tended to look puny next to their counterparts in Europe, Africa,
Speaker 1: and Asia. For example, a next to one Indian tiger
Speaker 1: the Mexican jaguar is a tabby for the article This
Speaker 1: episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke via email with
Speaker 1: environmental historian Mark Barrow Junior. He said Buffon was a
Speaker 1: materialist who believed that a limited number of life forms
Speaker 1: originally appeared on the Earth through spontaneous generation, and that
Speaker 1: as they migrated to different environments, they responded to the
Speaker 1: conditions they encountered there by changing form. So Buffon's theory
Speaker 1: blamed the climate. Though he had never set foot in
Speaker 1: the America's he assumed that it was a swampy place
Speaker 1: that had only recently come up out of the sea,
Speaker 1: and that this caused the animals that had come here
Speaker 1: to degenerate, becoming quote weaker, smaller, and less able to reproduce.
Speaker 1: And Buffoon didn't stop there. He claimed the same thing
Speaker 1: had happened to human beings who had come to the Americas,
Speaker 1: and that it would continue to happen to European immigrants offspring,
Speaker 1: and that the Americas would there four never be home
Speaker 1: to a great civilization. Barro said Americans found this theory
Speaker 1: quite threatening, and Jefferson set out to disprove it. We're
Speaker 1: going to get into how and why he sought out
Speaker 1: living mastodons, but first we're going to get into a
Speaker 1: quick break forward from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank
Speaker 1: you sponsors, Okay. Thomas Jefferson, who was born in Virginia
Speaker 1: and served as its second governor. Spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time and energy on disproving the theory of American degeneracy in
Speaker 1: the seventeen seventies and eighties, which we should note was
Speaker 1: a busy time for the United States. In other ways,
Speaker 1: in the midst and immediate aftermath of the Revolution, Jefferson
Speaker 1: collected and published precise measurements of various American animals in
Speaker 1: comparison with their European counterparts. He dragged friends and compatriots
Speaker 1: into this with the help of the governor of New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: He once sent the French naturalist Buffon a massive dead moose,
Speaker 1: which was much worse for the travel and wearing a
Speaker 1: set of antlers from some other animal because the original
Speaker 1: set got lost along the way. But it was proof
Speaker 1: that big animals do grow in the Americas, and in
Speaker 1: his seventeen eighty five book Notes on the State of Virginia,
Speaker 1: Jefferson bolstered his case by writing about the giant incognitum.
Speaker 1: He called it a mammoth, then of big bone lick.
Speaker 1: With the evidence mounting against Buffon's theory, it fell apart
Speaker 1: much like the corpse of a moose arriving in Paris
Speaker 1: a year after its untimely end a continent away. American
Speaker 1: mammoths became a sensation and source of national pride, especially
Speaker 1: after a nearly complete fossil model was compiled and displayed
Speaker 1: in Charles Wilson Peel's Philadelphia Museum in eighteen oh one
Speaker 1: with the help of enslaved labor. It was the second
Speaker 1: ever fossil skeleton to be assembled in the world, and
Speaker 1: the excavation of its components from the Hudson River Valley
Speaker 1: was probably the first official paleontology expedition in the United States. Still,
Speaker 1: Jefferson's love of fossils was ridiculed by his opponents in
Speaker 1: the cutthroat presidential race of eighteen hundred. It was forty
Speaker 1: years before dinosaurs would be recognized and catch the world's imagination,
Speaker 1: but Jefferson carried the day and won the newly completed
Speaker 1: White House. While in office, his biggest achievement was arguably
Speaker 1: the Louisiana purchase of eighteen oh three. Before Meriwether Lewis
Speaker 1: and William Clark set out to survey the newly bought land,
Speaker 1: Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for living mammots.
Speaker 1: Back then, extinction seemed impossible to many naturalists, including the President.
Speaker 1: The basic idea it was that if the Earth is
Speaker 1: a divine and perfect creation, then no part of it
Speaker 1: could ever truly perish. There was a belief in a
Speaker 1: great chain of being too great to be broken, Barrow said.
Speaker 1: Since mastodons and mammoths could not possibly be extinct, Jefferson
Speaker 1: and others thought they must still be roaming around in
Speaker 1: the unexplored parts of the world, unexplored like to European
Speaker 1: colonists the North American West. Though Lewis and Clark found
Speaker 1: no live specimens, Lewis sent the President a couple of
Speaker 1: new Incognium fossils from Big Bone Lick, at Jefferson's behest.
Speaker 1: Clark returned to the Ohio River fossil bed with a
Speaker 1: ten man team in eighteen oh seven. The fossils that
Speaker 1: Clark's party dug up were proudly displayed at the Jefferson
Speaker 1: White House. Meanwhile, back in Paris, a French anatomist known
Speaker 1: as George Cuvier had been pouring over the different samples
Speaker 1: of elephants and elephant like fossils that had been collected there.
Speaker 1: In eighteen oh six, he published a study that determined
Speaker 1: the Incognitium was a separate species from the mammoths and
Speaker 1: named it mastadante. I always assumed that this was a
Speaker 1: mast as an masticate and dante as in tooth, but
Speaker 1: it turns out it was masked as in breast because
Speaker 1: the guy found that the aforementioned knobs on the molars
Speaker 1: reminded him of boobs. Anyway, Cuvier also included the truly
Speaker 1: shocking hypothesis that both of these creatures were extinct, that
Speaker 1: they were too different from living elephants to be the
Speaker 1: same creatures, and that there was no evidence that they
Speaker 1: were still roaming the earth. He laid out a concept
Speaker 1: that throughout history there had been periodic catastrophic die offs
Speaker 1: after which new species had supernaturally arisen, and that this
Speaker 1: cycle continues. He didn't believe in evolution, to be clear,
Speaker 1: he did believe in scientific racism, so he was not
Speaker 1: always right. We wouldn't get in on evolution until a
Speaker 1: half century later with Charles Darwin's work, but this study
Speaker 1: of elephants and mammoths and mastodons marked the first time
Speaker 1: that the wide European scientific community took the idea of extinction. Seriously,
Speaker 1: not bad work for a bunch of old bones. Today,
Speaker 1: some of those bones are on view in museums all
Speaker 1: over the United States and Europe, then beyond, others returned
Speaker 1: to Kentucky. In nineteen sixty, the Big Bone Lick Fossil
Speaker 1: Site was incorporated into a new state park. A museum
Speaker 1: is now on the premises, along with life sized statues
Speaker 1: of the prehistoric critters. At the entrance, visitors are greeted
Speaker 1: by a sign that reads Big Bone Lick Historic Site,
Speaker 1: Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article The mask Don Boneyard that Stole Thomas Jefferson's
Speaker 1: Heart on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain
Speaker 1: Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
Speaker 1: Com and is produced by Tyler Quain. Four more podcasts
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