American Monster (review)

American Monster by Paul Semonin. New York Univ. Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2000. $28.95, trade. ISBN: 0-8147-8120-9.

Our current picture of the deep past is radically different from the one that prevailed at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In 1750, most Westerners believed that human beings came into existence 6 days after the beginning of time. The first humans were immortal and lived in Eden, a place without death or misery. Suffering commenced with the fall, and toil, childbirth and mortality have been with us ever since. Today, we believe almost the exact opposite: that human beings are evolutionary newcomers to a world previously ruled by brutal beasts, such as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Over the last 10,000 years, we have gradually replaced the old nature, red in tooth and claw, with a humanized second nature that, for all of its violence and uncertainty, delivers at least a few people from toil and promises widespread relief from many kinds of suffering, including childbirth and someday, perhaps, death itself. Both constructs are myths. It is easy to recognize the mythological elements of the Eden story, but not so easy to pinpoint them in contemporary beliefs. The problem is that contemporary beliefs about the deep past have received very little attention from historians. Paul Semonin's American Monster fills this void.

American Monster tells the story of how mastodons were discovered and assimilated into European and Anglo-American culture. It is a story involving science, religion, politics and the birth of museum culture. Most of us know about mastodons from natural history dioramas, where bedraggled stuffed toys, grazing on dusty grass, are about to be speared by men in loincloths, or sink into tar-pits. An air of pathos seems to hover about these bulky creatures--they do not even have the luck to be destroyed by an asteroid. The founding fathers of our nation, however, envisioned mastodons quite differently, as ferocious carnivores capable of devouring deer, elk and human beings in single chomps. Furthermore, these terrifying monsters either still roamed unexplored regions of the West or, if they did not, their very absence threatened deeply held beliefs. Mastodons quickly became symbols of the new nation's spirit.

Semonin begins the story in 1705, when a tooth weighing nearly five pounds was unearthed along the Hudson River near Albany. The governor of New York Province sent the specimen, labeled the "tooth of a Giant," to the Royal Society in London, then Britain's foremost authority on scientific matters. That the tooth belonged to a human giant was a perfectly reasonable assumption at the time, given that dinosaurs were unknown, and that the Bible, which was the ultimate authority on nature, mentions giants but not extinction. The very concept of an extinct species was still anathema. At about the same time, reports of enormous tusks and bones reached Western Europe from Siberia. For centuries, people there had made tools from the ivory of mysterious animals that Ostiack tribesmen called "mammuts." These, the tribesmen believed, were gigantic subterranean rats, tunneling to escape the cold. Naturalists dismissed these stories and, replacing folklore with folklore, proposed that the tusks belonged to unicorns, or to the Biblical Behemoth.

In the next century, many more remains surfaced, both in the Old World and the New. The science of comparative anatomy was still in its infancy, but evidence quickly accumulated that Siberian mammoth bones, as well as the bones of the American creature which had come to be known as the "incognitum," resembled those of elephants. How did the remains of elephants, which are tropical animals, reach the north? The most widespread theory was that elephants had drowned in Noah's Flood and been swept north by the raging deluge. Careful observers, like Sir Hans Sloane, who succeeded Sir Isaac Newton as president of the Royal Society, recognized that, although the bones of mammoths and incognitums were elephant-like, they were larger and did not quite conform to those of any living pachyderm. In the 1760s, the French...