Fossil Legends of the First Americans (review)

Few books have had such an influence on my thinking as Adrienne Mayor's book on fossil legends of the New World. For one thing, it invites one to ask how anyone can make old stories about old bones both so interesting and so worthwhile. Years ago I wrote a book about vampire folklore, and so many people asked me about the best books on the subject that I finally tried to answer the question. Eventually I realized that there weren't any "best books" (no Adrienne Mayor had ever tackled the subject); there were only best sections of books and a few best articles, some of them hidden away in old journals in foreign languages. These had stood the test of time not by answering all the questions in the subject but by resolutely putting together vast amounts of data with meticulous care. The theory-driven books all had the same defect: they stayed with scholarly fashions and adjusted the data to fit. When the fashions died, the books died.

What is so wrong with theory-based books? Nothing, as long as the theory derives from the data. But for this to happen, the scholar must amass the evidence, stir it around in a caldron, and watch it bubble until a pattern forms. It's much simpler to pick a theory from the fashion rack and adorn it with some data.

It's not only much simpler; it's much safer. When you let the theories form themselves, you can't count on them to match the taboos of the age. And you don't know where that theory has been. But what if your theory is new? Then you have a different problem: new ideas are typically accepted only when they have some sort of fit with current thought. Indeed, human beings like originality only in retrospect, when it's no longer new, which may be why Gregor Mendel remained unknown during his lifetime. A revolutionary idea, after all, is always "wrong" when it appears. Alfred Wegener's insight about continental drift, now a basic tenet of geology, earned him only derision a century ago. Timing is everything.

To write a lasting book, then, you would have to put in absolutely inhuman amounts of hard work to ensure that no one could ever overcome your lead in data collection. You would also have to show originality and enterprise in finding new ways of collecting data, and you would have to have learned along the way how to write gracefully, so the data would come across as wonderful stories rather than leaden fact. And all this while staying within the semantic framework of current scholarship.

All this Adrienne Mayor does. I still remember my initial reaction to another book of hers, The First Fossil Hunters—how skepticism welled up in me as I started to read, only to be battered down by the weight of evidence. The same thing happened to me here, as I shall confess presently.

What Mayor has done is astonishing. She has been so thorough that it's difficult to imagine anyone ever writing a more definitive book on her subject (covering, chapter by chapter, the Northeast, "New Spain," the Southwest, the Prairies, and the High Plains). A hundred years from now, this book will surely continue to be read, consulted, and mined for data. I would not want to be a piece of data seeking to escape her attention. Consider her account of fossils collected in the eighteenth century from Big Bone Lick in the Ohio Valley. In 2000, she followed some pieces of mastodon all the way to the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and there, with the valuable aid of curator Pascal Tassy, who happened to have unearthed those particular specimens that very week, she unraveled their complicated history.

This illustrates the lengths to which Mayor has gone in order to get her facts straight, but it doesn...