WEBVTT - How Did Mastodons Defend the Legitimacy of America? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.560 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff, 0:00:07.640 --> 0:00:13.560 Lauren Bobebam here. As much as paleontology is about revealing 0:00:13.560 --> 0:00:17.320 the stories of creatures that lived long ago, it also 0:00:17.400 --> 0:00:21.680 tells the stories of the scientific process and progress and 0:00:21.800 --> 0:00:26.239 biases of the time in which it's conducted. We've talked 0:00:26.239 --> 0:00:28.440 a bit about this before on the show, in episodes 0:00:28.480 --> 0:00:33.520 about specific dinosaurs or about paleo art. You can track 0:00:33.640 --> 0:00:37.840 science's concept of what a dinosaur even is through depictions 0:00:37.880 --> 0:00:41.800 of say, a Terranosaurus rex, from the lizard like and 0:00:41.840 --> 0:00:45.360 shrink wrapped images of the past to the birdlike and 0:00:45.600 --> 0:00:50.440 dad bad depictions of today. Along similar lines, you can 0:00:50.479 --> 0:00:54.920 track science's concepts of extinction and evolution through dealings with 0:00:55.080 --> 0:00:59.520 mastodon fossils throughout the seventeen hundreds, and one of the 0:00:59.600 --> 0:01:03.200 United States founders, Thomas Jefferson, used them to defend the 0:01:03.320 --> 0:01:09.320 very honor of his emerging country. But okay, let's step 0:01:09.520 --> 0:01:14.120 way back. During the Last Ice Age, what's now Boone 0:01:14.200 --> 0:01:18.240 County in northern Kentucky was a swampy wetland teeming with 0:01:18.360 --> 0:01:23.000 mega animals. On the ground lay exposed deposits of salt 0:01:23.280 --> 0:01:27.520 or salt licks that attracted herbivores in need of sodium supplements. 0:01:28.520 --> 0:01:32.240 Predators such as humans grew wise to this and ambushed 0:01:32.240 --> 0:01:36.480 careless animals at the licks. The swamps were not safe 0:01:36.520 --> 0:01:41.040 loitering places overall, Every so often creatures that came to 0:01:41.080 --> 0:01:43.640 eat the salt or each other got stuck in the 0:01:43.720 --> 0:01:48.040 mud and died. Radiometric dating tells us that the earliest 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:52.760 victims perished there just over eighteen thousand years ago. Time 0:01:52.920 --> 0:01:56.480 turned the region into a graveyard, a mass burial site 0:01:56.640 --> 0:02:01.120 loaded with fossilized bones along the Ohio River Valley. Some 0:02:01.280 --> 0:02:05.640 were left behind by species that still exist today, like cariboo. 0:02:05.840 --> 0:02:12.240 Others represent mastodons, ground sloths, and other extinct giants. The 0:02:12.280 --> 0:02:15.880 first Europeans to learn of the Ohio River's amazing bone 0:02:15.880 --> 0:02:19.120 bed were members of a French military expedition led by 0:02:19.200 --> 0:02:23.120 Charles the third le Moin de Longue. When his party 0:02:23.200 --> 0:02:26.840 visited the area in seventeen thirty nine, the native Abenaki 0:02:26.880 --> 0:02:30.720 guides who hunted for them found some fossilized tusks, a 0:02:30.760 --> 0:02:33.680 few teeth, and one femur as big as a person. 0:02:35.120 --> 0:02:38.679 Thanks to these colossal fossils, the area became known as 0:02:38.919 --> 0:02:42.079 Big bone Lick. It still goes by that name today. 0:02:43.440 --> 0:02:47.400 LEMOUI sent these specimens to King Louis the fifteenth in Paris. 0:02:48.400 --> 0:02:51.240 Elephant like fossils were of some interest to Europeans at 0:02:51.240 --> 0:02:54.920 the time, due to other finds earlier in the seventeen hundreds, 0:02:55.880 --> 0:02:58.560 no one really knew what to make of them. A 0:02:58.800 --> 0:03:01.600 tooth and other bones found in the Hudson River Valley 0:03:01.639 --> 0:03:04.600 in New York in seventeen oh five were speculated to 0:03:04.639 --> 0:03:08.840 be from an ancient giant humanoid with ribs like rafters. 0:03:10.040 --> 0:03:13.120 It was only in the seventeen twenties that European naturalists 0:03:13.160 --> 0:03:16.840 identified teeth and tusks found in Siberia, Italy and the 0:03:16.840 --> 0:03:20.760 British Isles as being from some kind of elephant like species, 0:03:21.320 --> 0:03:24.040 though their best guess was that the bones were those 0:03:24.080 --> 0:03:27.960 of everyday elephants washed there from southern climes during the 0:03:28.000 --> 0:03:32.880 Biblical Great Flood. Parisian naturalists identified the big Bone Lick 0:03:32.960 --> 0:03:37.280 fossils as being more of the same. Today, we know 0:03:37.400 --> 0:03:40.800 that the Ohio River's bones belonged to the American mastodon, 0:03:41.120 --> 0:03:46.400 a taxonomical name Mammet americanum. The Siberian, Italian, and British 0:03:46.400 --> 0:03:48.640 bones and ones that would be found later in the 0:03:48.680 --> 0:03:52.560 American West were from various species of mammoths, which are 0:03:52.600 --> 0:03:57.600 related to mastodons, but in a separate genus anyway. Traders 0:03:57.600 --> 0:04:00.880 and land surveyors collected additional fossils at Big Bone Lick 0:04:00.960 --> 0:04:05.680 in these seventeen fifties and sixties. Scholars were especially intrigued 0:04:05.720 --> 0:04:08.760 by the huge molars coming out of the site. The 0:04:08.800 --> 0:04:11.960 biggest weighed more than six pounds or around three kilows, 0:04:12.280 --> 0:04:16.839 and all of them had knobby cone shaped cups. The 0:04:16.960 --> 0:04:21.159 modern consensus is that mastadons used these two too tough vegetation, 0:04:22.080 --> 0:04:25.719 but in the eighteenth century many envisioned a different diet, 0:04:26.000 --> 0:04:29.560 and it wasn't just the molars. Some naturalists thought that 0:04:29.600 --> 0:04:33.159 the animal's tusks would have curved downward like saber teeth, 0:04:33.600 --> 0:04:36.839 and some mistook the claws of ground slots as belonging 0:04:36.920 --> 0:04:42.279 to mastodons. When Benjamin Franklin received a box of mastodon fossils, 0:04:42.320 --> 0:04:45.159 he wrote a quote, The tusks agree with those of 0:04:45.200 --> 0:04:49.119 the African and Asiatic elephant, but the grinders differ, being 0:04:49.320 --> 0:04:54.640 full knobs like the grinders of a carnivorous animal. They 0:04:54.760 --> 0:04:59.479 thought the mastodon was a colossal flesh eating monster. A 0:04:59.520 --> 0:05:02.520 mast wound up getting their name because of these molars, 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:06.400 which it turned out, differed from the flatter teeth of mammoths. 0:05:06.800 --> 0:05:11.760 But at the time this mysterious monster was called incognitum, 0:05:12.000 --> 0:05:15.400 which is basically Latin for we don't know what it is. 0:05:16.600 --> 0:05:20.480 Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the fossils of the Ohio River, 0:05:21.320 --> 0:05:23.760 partially because he was really into the study of nature, 0:05:24.080 --> 0:05:27.960 but partially because he could use the incognitium to refute 0:05:28.279 --> 0:05:32.799 a widely circulated argument about the inherent inferiority of the 0:05:32.800 --> 0:05:38.840 so called New World. Okay, In seventeen sixty six, the 0:05:38.880 --> 0:05:42.360 French naturalist Georges Louis the Clerk de Befolme published his 0:05:42.680 --> 0:05:47.719 theory of American Degeneracy. Buffoon wondered why creatures of the 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:52.240 Americas tended to look puny next to their counterparts in Europe, Africa, 0:05:52.240 --> 0:05:56.120 and Asia. For example, a next to one Indian tiger 0:05:56.520 --> 0:06:00.680 the Mexican jaguar is a tabby for the article This 0:06:00.720 --> 0:06:03.440 episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke via email with 0:06:03.560 --> 0:06:08.479 environmental historian Mark Barrow Junior. He said Buffon was a 0:06:08.520 --> 0:06:11.960 materialist who believed that a limited number of life forms 0:06:12.000 --> 0:06:15.680 originally appeared on the Earth through spontaneous generation, and that 0:06:15.880 --> 0:06:19.240 as they migrated to different environments, they responded to the 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:25.839 conditions they encountered there by changing form. So Buffon's theory 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:29.400 blamed the climate. Though he had never set foot in 0:06:29.400 --> 0:06:32.400 the America's he assumed that it was a swampy place 0:06:32.520 --> 0:06:34.840 that had only recently come up out of the sea, 0:06:35.400 --> 0:06:37.960 and that this caused the animals that had come here 0:06:38.160 --> 0:06:43.240 to degenerate, becoming quote weaker, smaller, and less able to reproduce. 0:06:45.520 --> 0:06:49.200 And Buffoon didn't stop there. He claimed the same thing 0:06:49.240 --> 0:06:52.280 had happened to human beings who had come to the Americas, 0:06:53.160 --> 0:06:57.000 and that it would continue to happen to European immigrants offspring, 0:06:57.880 --> 0:07:01.599 and that the Americas would there four never be home 0:07:01.800 --> 0:07:07.360 to a great civilization. Barro said Americans found this theory 0:07:07.560 --> 0:07:12.880 quite threatening, and Jefferson set out to disprove it. We're 0:07:13.040 --> 0:07:15.880 going to get into how and why he sought out 0:07:15.960 --> 0:07:19.080 living mastodons, but first we're going to get into a 0:07:19.200 --> 0:07:26.400 quick break forward from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank 0:07:26.440 --> 0:07:32.040 you sponsors, Okay. Thomas Jefferson, who was born in Virginia 0:07:32.200 --> 0:07:35.360 and served as its second governor. Spent a lot of 0:07:35.400 --> 0:07:39.360 time and energy on disproving the theory of American degeneracy in 0:07:39.400 --> 0:07:43.480 the seventeen seventies and eighties, which we should note was 0:07:43.560 --> 0:07:47.320 a busy time for the United States. In other ways, 0:07:47.400 --> 0:07:51.560 in the midst and immediate aftermath of the Revolution, Jefferson 0:07:51.720 --> 0:07:56.120 collected and published precise measurements of various American animals in 0:07:56.160 --> 0:08:01.440 comparison with their European counterparts. He dragged friends and compatriots 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:04.600 into this with the help of the governor of New Hampshire. 0:08:04.800 --> 0:08:09.120 He once sent the French naturalist Buffon a massive dead moose, 0:08:09.640 --> 0:08:12.880 which was much worse for the travel and wearing a 0:08:12.920 --> 0:08:15.880 set of antlers from some other animal because the original 0:08:15.960 --> 0:08:19.360 set got lost along the way. But it was proof 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:24.560 that big animals do grow in the Americas, and in 0:08:24.560 --> 0:08:27.680 his seventeen eighty five book Notes on the State of Virginia, 0:08:28.080 --> 0:08:32.320 Jefferson bolstered his case by writing about the giant incognitum. 0:08:32.800 --> 0:08:35.760 He called it a mammoth, then of big bone lick. 0:08:37.160 --> 0:08:40.680 With the evidence mounting against Buffon's theory, it fell apart 0:08:41.320 --> 0:08:43.760 much like the corpse of a moose arriving in Paris 0:08:43.800 --> 0:08:48.160 a year after its untimely end a continent away. American 0:08:48.240 --> 0:08:53.000 mammoths became a sensation and source of national pride, especially 0:08:53.080 --> 0:08:57.000 after a nearly complete fossil model was compiled and displayed 0:08:57.240 --> 0:09:00.720 in Charles Wilson Peel's Philadelphia Museum in eighteen oh one 0:09:01.040 --> 0:09:04.920 with the help of enslaved labor. It was the second 0:09:04.960 --> 0:09:08.439 ever fossil skeleton to be assembled in the world, and 0:09:08.480 --> 0:09:11.400 the excavation of its components from the Hudson River Valley 0:09:11.800 --> 0:09:18.040 was probably the first official paleontology expedition in the United States. Still, 0:09:18.200 --> 0:09:21.640 Jefferson's love of fossils was ridiculed by his opponents in 0:09:21.679 --> 0:09:25.640 the cutthroat presidential race of eighteen hundred. It was forty 0:09:25.720 --> 0:09:29.359 years before dinosaurs would be recognized and catch the world's imagination, 0:09:30.840 --> 0:09:34.000 but Jefferson carried the day and won the newly completed 0:09:34.000 --> 0:09:39.320 White House. While in office, his biggest achievement was arguably 0:09:39.480 --> 0:09:44.200 the Louisiana purchase of eighteen oh three. Before Meriwether Lewis 0:09:44.200 --> 0:09:47.440 and William Clark set out to survey the newly bought land, 0:09:47.880 --> 0:09:51.199 Jefferson told them to keep an eye out for living mammots. 0:09:52.679 --> 0:09:58.080 Back then, extinction seemed impossible to many naturalists, including the President. 0:09:58.960 --> 0:10:01.520 The basic idea it was that if the Earth is 0:10:01.640 --> 0:10:05.679 a divine and perfect creation, then no part of it 0:10:05.720 --> 0:10:09.320 could ever truly perish. There was a belief in a 0:10:09.520 --> 0:10:14.800 great chain of being too great to be broken, Barrow said. 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:19.040 Since mastodons and mammoths could not possibly be extinct, Jefferson 0:10:19.080 --> 0:10:22.120 and others thought they must still be roaming around in 0:10:22.160 --> 0:10:28.200 the unexplored parts of the world, unexplored like to European 0:10:28.200 --> 0:10:32.760 colonists the North American West. Though Lewis and Clark found 0:10:32.920 --> 0:10:36.000 no live specimens, Lewis sent the President a couple of 0:10:36.040 --> 0:10:40.720 new Incognium fossils from Big Bone Lick, at Jefferson's behest. 0:10:41.000 --> 0:10:43.520 Clark returned to the Ohio River fossil bed with a 0:10:43.559 --> 0:10:46.960 ten man team in eighteen oh seven. The fossils that 0:10:47.000 --> 0:10:49.840 Clark's party dug up were proudly displayed at the Jefferson 0:10:49.880 --> 0:10:55.400 White House. Meanwhile, back in Paris, a French anatomist known 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:59.280 as George Cuvier had been pouring over the different samples 0:10:59.280 --> 0:11:02.680 of elephants and elephant like fossils that had been collected there. 0:11:03.840 --> 0:11:06.840 In eighteen oh six, he published a study that determined 0:11:07.000 --> 0:11:10.800 the Incognitium was a separate species from the mammoths and 0:11:10.920 --> 0:11:14.960 named it mastadante. I always assumed that this was a 0:11:15.200 --> 0:11:18.720 mast as an masticate and dante as in tooth, but 0:11:18.800 --> 0:11:21.800 it turns out it was masked as in breast because 0:11:22.240 --> 0:11:25.320 the guy found that the aforementioned knobs on the molars 0:11:25.640 --> 0:11:31.360 reminded him of boobs. Anyway, Cuvier also included the truly 0:11:31.480 --> 0:11:36.080 shocking hypothesis that both of these creatures were extinct, that 0:11:36.120 --> 0:11:38.719 they were too different from living elephants to be the 0:11:38.760 --> 0:11:41.880 same creatures, and that there was no evidence that they 0:11:41.880 --> 0:11:45.559 were still roaming the earth. He laid out a concept 0:11:45.679 --> 0:11:50.000 that throughout history there had been periodic catastrophic die offs 0:11:50.480 --> 0:11:54.560 after which new species had supernaturally arisen, and that this 0:11:54.640 --> 0:11:59.520 cycle continues. He didn't believe in evolution, to be clear, 0:12:00.320 --> 0:12:03.920 he did believe in scientific racism, so he was not 0:12:04.080 --> 0:12:08.000 always right. We wouldn't get in on evolution until a 0:12:08.040 --> 0:12:13.160 half century later with Charles Darwin's work, but this study 0:12:13.320 --> 0:12:17.559 of elephants and mammoths and mastodons marked the first time 0:12:17.720 --> 0:12:22.960 that the wide European scientific community took the idea of extinction. Seriously, 0:12:24.000 --> 0:12:28.079 not bad work for a bunch of old bones. Today, 0:12:28.240 --> 0:12:30.800 some of those bones are on view in museums all 0:12:30.840 --> 0:12:34.920 over the United States and Europe, then beyond, others returned 0:12:34.960 --> 0:12:39.160 to Kentucky. In nineteen sixty, the Big Bone Lick Fossil 0:12:39.200 --> 0:12:43.040 Site was incorporated into a new state park. A museum 0:12:43.080 --> 0:12:46.360 is now on the premises, along with life sized statues 0:12:46.400 --> 0:12:51.000 of the prehistoric critters. At the entrance, visitors are greeted 0:12:51.040 --> 0:12:54.360 by a sign that reads Big Bone Lick Historic Site, 0:12:54.640 --> 0:13:03.640 Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology. Today's episode is based on 0:13:03.640 --> 0:13:06.880 the article The mask Don Boneyard that Stole Thomas Jefferson's 0:13:06.880 --> 0:13:10.560 Heart on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain 0:13:10.559 --> 0:13:13.640 Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot 0:13:13.640 --> 0:13:16.959 Com and is produced by Tyler Quain. Four more podcasts 0:13:16.960 --> 0:13:20.400 from my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:13:20.480 --> 0:13:22.480 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.