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by Paul Semonin.
NYU Press: New York, 2000.
$28.95, cloth.
ISBN 0-8147-8120-9.
Reviewed by George Gessert, 1230 West Broadway, Eugene, Oregon 97402, U.S.A. E-mail: ggessert@igc.org


Our picture of the deep past is radically different from the one that prevailed at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In 1750 Westerners believed that human beings came into existence six 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 ten thousand years we have gradually replaced the old nature, red in tooth and claw, with a humanized second nature, which, 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 tarpits. An air of pathos seems to hover about these bulky creatures - they don't 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, labelled 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, tunnelling 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 naturalist Buffon, after examining incognitum remains, hinted that they belonged to creatures that might be extinct. This fit his theory of American degeneracy, which postulated that the Old World had many more large animals than the New because the latter's watery landscapes and cool climate (perhaps he had read a few too many reports from French Canada) had deleterious effects on large and noble creatures. Debilitating vapors had gradually destroyed all of the most formidable forms of life that God had originally placed in the Americas.

Buffon published his ideas in his immensely influential Histoire Naturelle. By cautiously legitimizing the notion of extinction, Buffon opened the door to ideas that would lead to Darwin's theory of evolution. However, what most concerned Buffon's North American contemporaries were not his subversive suggestions about extinction, but the theory of American degeneracy. Buffon did not explicitly state that European settlements in the New World were doomed to decay, but he hinted as much, which was more than enough to offend Anglo-Americans.

Benjamin Franklin helped turn the incognitum to American advantage. He suggested that the monster may not have been herbivorous, like elephants, but a carnivore. As luck would have it, Dr. William Hunter, London's foremost authority on the incognitum, came to the same conclusion. Hunter made his case in an influential paper published in 1769 which concluded "we cannot but thank Heaven that [the incognitum] is probably extinct." By coupling the heretical idea of extinction with God on the one hand, and a ferocious carnivore on the other, Hunter laid the foundation for a new myth of prehistory to replace Eden. In this new myth the past was no paradise, but a Hobbsian battleground where the less godly made way for the more godly. The idea quickly won favor, no doubt because it suggested a flattering interpretation of imperial expansion, and could be used to justify exploitation and slaughter of subject peoples.

In America Hunter's carnivorous incognitum was welcomed both as proof of the need to exterminate indigenous savages, and as a refutation of the theory of degeneracy. The ferocity of the incognitum, and its great size, greater than living elephants - greater, that is, than any other terrestrial animal, since dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna were still unknown - quickly came to symbolize the new nation's spirit. Because of this, the founding fathers took an intense interest in the incognitum. During the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, George Washington, Commander in Chief of the rebel armies, found time to view incognitum teeth unearthed near West Point. Almost simultaneously Jefferson was writing about the fossil elephants of North America, which he believed still lived in unexplored regions of the northwest. When Jefferson became president, he devoted an entire room of the presidential mansion to bones of the incognitum, and commanded Lewis and Clark to seek mastodons in the West. None showed up, of course, but Jefferson died in 1826 still believing that they roamed somewhere beyond the frontier.

Because of the peculiarities of their experience, Anglo-Americans were profoundly uneasy about the past. Like all peoples, they needed a past, but the histories most obviously available to them, those of Europe and Native America, were unacceptable, Europe because it represented corruption and injustice, and Native America because it was nonwhite and pagan, and also because to recognize it would have been to grant legitimacy to Indian claims to the continent. Without a human history to embrace, citizens of the new republic made the radical leap of finding their history in the land itself. Here was everything that the Old World had and more, immense ruins and fragmentary myths in the forms of mountains, canyons, primeval forests, and the fossils of monsters.

By 1800 the incognitum had become a national obsession. Incognitum bones were sought like buried treasure, sold for thousands of dollars, enormous sums in those days, and exhibited in traveling shows and museums, such as the Philadelphia Museum which was established by the artist Charles Willson Peale and became a prototype for the new nation. The publicity surrounding these shows made mastodons ever more terrifying: trees toppled when they passed, they devoured elk in single bites, they ate humans, they wiped out entire villages. The travelling shows became increasingly Barnumesque, and as they did, the new myth of prehistoric nature took hold in American culture. By the 1850s, when dinosaurs began to replace mastodons in popular imagination, all the elements of present day myths of the deep past were in place: prehistoric nature was savage, and it was literally ruled by single species, or by elite assemblages of species. The raw energy of this primordial realm fueled progress. Life and death struggles were not in vain: they produced endless improvements, culminating in nature's replacement by human constructs.

Today movies such as Jurassic Park perpetuate these myths, but so do some paleontologists. In an afterword, "The Myth of Wild Nature," Semonin quotes paleontologist Bob Bakker, best known for his theories about warm-blooded dinosaurs, that "dinosaurs spread their ecological hegemony across a worldwide empire... No corner of the Mesozoic world withstood colonization by the dinosaurs." This is the language of the global corporate order, not science. No nonhuman animals except arguably ants rule other species in anything remotely comparable to human patterns.

American Monster's 59 illustrations include scientific studies of bones, early reconstructions of the incognitum, some quite amusing, and finely rendered but chilling anatomical drawings that illustrate supposedly timeless aesthetic hierarchies among the races. There are more than 30 pages of footnotes, as well as a lengthy bibliography, but American Monster is written for general readers as well as specialists. Fluid, well-paced, rich in detail yet precise, Semonin's style would be the envy of a novelist. For anyone interested in myths of the prehuman past, in the social functions of those myths, and in the origins of contemporary consciousness about extinction, this book is essential.

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