On The Margins Of Cryptozoology, Part Last, I think.

Once upon a time in the 16th century, one of those many bastards who became honored by various crown heads for being successful murderous bastards, "Sir" John Hawkins, was plying his grisly trade of killing people, abducting others for slave trade, and generally appalling his mother who thought she'd raised a nice boy. While in the Caribbean, his fleet fell upon hard knocks and several ships were sunk. Overloaded with survivors, Hawkins did the right thing: he threw the excess off the ship onto Mexican shores to fend for themselves. Priorities.

One of those excess was David Ingram. Ingram and two others did what they had to do. They walked all the way to Nova Scotia.

This is the world that David Ingram walked into. It was a world explored mainly at its edges. And mainly by Spanish mariners and their map-makers. The coasts were poorly known; the interiors almost not at all.

People doubt that David Ingram could have made that walk. I don't. The only issue is the amount of time it would take him to do it. When Ingram got back to England, his story, as far as its beginnings were concerned, was attested to by Hawkins. Ingram began in upper Mexico near Tampico, and somehow ended up in Nova Scotia from where he got passage home. The first part of his tale is sensible. The Indians of upper Mexico could easily be viewed as "cannibals". "High" Mexican cultures ate hearts of sacrifices, and there were other known flesh-eaters in America [whether to absorb an opponent's power, or just his protein]. Ingram came to the mouth of the Rio Grande, crossed over, and made his way around the Gulf coast to a known place in "Florida" named something like the Rio May. From there he apparently struck out for the Atlantic coast, on foot or using small boats when possible. Note on this map that the maker knows very little about the interior, except that it is speckled with Indian towns.

Somehow Ingram plows northward between the Appalachians and the sea until some say he comes near the mythical land of Norumbega. I've read the "official" rendition as compiled by interviewers of his responses to questions about his journey, and I see no evidence that he visited Norumbega in any form resembling the semi-magical descriptions some had of the place. Doubtless he did pass through Penobscot Indian areas, but the most one might truly say from his narrative is that the country was rich in good hides.

But that's not our current interest.

The passage of interest occurs within a general set of sentences about the wildlife of North America. This part of the narrative goes forward fairly believably and then this:

"This examinate {Ingram} did also see in those countries a monstrous beast twice as big as a horse and in proportion to a horse, both in mane, hoof, hair, and neighing, saving it was small towards the hinder parts like a greyhound. These beasts had two teeth or horns of a foot long growing straight forth by their nostrils." [He, by the way, describes Bisons clearly and differently].

Well, I can see a mammoth or more likely a mastodon in there. Other than the fact that Ingram isn't supposed to be seeing a mastodon, what's the problem? The problem is that you cannot obviously trust the written narrative in a variety of ways. This thing is no literal retelling of what Ingram said at all, but rather a botched-up mishmash of writing by whomever wrote it down. Topics range all over the place with no chronology and little geography. The reader gets the impression of a man being quizzed for answers and speaking of what he knew from all over the Caribbean and Mexico let alone the pre-USA area. The prose sometimes seems to include insertions possibly not meant or even said by Ingram at all. [An Example: directly following the "mastodon" remark, the writer says Ingram saw Elephants too.] Also, one gets the impression that this is a Poor Man's Marco Polo, integrating things actually seen with things merely told, and making no allowance for the difference in his remarks. One can actually see a possible "honest" way of interpreting this, if the inquisitor [this interview was instigated by Queen Elizabeth's Sheriff] was asking generic questions like "what sorts of jewels do they have?", and Ingram responds with both what he saw and what he was told, and the "secretary" just writes it all down without interpretation.

If that was all, though, that would be OK in my book, as the description is pretty good if it came out of nowhere. But other elements of Ingram's tale must give one at least some pause. I actually can come to peace with almost all of them, but two are real "intellectual irritations". One:

" He did also see one other strange beast bigger than a bear. He had neither head nor neck. His eyes and mouth were in his breast. This beast is very ugly to behold and cowardly of kind. It beareth a very fine skin like a rat, full of silver hairs". --- now where in the heck did he get THAT!?

Two: He states that there is a sort of demon in these indian religions called the Colluchie. The thing is a shapeshifter, sometimes like a black dog, sometimes like a black calf... which speaks. Upon once entering a poor man's house, the three walkers came upon a Colluchie. He said the thing had huge black eyes. Richard Brown immediately said that this was The Devil, and blessed himself with the Sign of the Cross. Richard Twide shouted at it: "I defy thee and all thy works!!!" At this assault, the Colluchie huddled down and stole away out the door "and was seen no more".

I might be able to dance my way around these inclusions [particularly the Colluchie, which could be a flat misperception of an animal], but to be honest, they do give one some concern over the tale-spinning option for dealing with some of Ingram's claims. All-in-all, the description of the reputed mastodon isn't bad, though.

So what's left? What's left are the oddly numerous enigmatic rock-carvings, pottery arts, statuary, et al which litter the anomalies landscape. To cover them would take a book.

Each bit of potential Mammoth/Mastodon evidence has its story. Some things like the Hava Supai canyon glyph and the Moab glyph [#s 3 & 7 in this stack] have interested professionals at least at the margins of the establishment. So has the Barnesville glyph [#1]. Others like the Holly Oak Pendant are widely thought to be hoaxed. The "tablet" thing is one of many tablets allegedly found claiming to demonstrate Phoenician pre-Columbian visitation to the New World, or Lost Tribes of Israel, or Mormon scriptural support. Everyone of these tablet-like things that I'm aware of are bad hoaxes. The one pictured here [#6], claims to mimic Phoenician alphabet signs, but I see little or no resemblance myself. The pottery impression though is particularly interesting to me, as it claims to come from a dig at Pachacamac, Peru, dating to c. 500AD.

The Moab Mastodon glyph has been stated to have significant desert environmental patina in the grooves of the design and is, therefore not very recent [i.e. somebody did not carve this thing in the last century]. On the other hand, the style/design of the thing, when compared with other glyphs in the same location, seems to place it in the "relatively recent but still old" category. [Thus, the last 1000 years].

In the very first issue of INFO Journal [the magazine of the International Fortean Organization, the "twin sister" of Sanderson's SITU], Ron Willis writes an exceptionally good review of the evidence on this topic. In it he states that in a dig at Petit Anse Island, LA remains of human habitation were found [including woven basketry] TWO FEET BELOW the remains of mastodons. A dig in Ecuador reportedly found mastodon bones with pottery, hearths, spearpoints et al. Ron also showed a rare, I believe, set of pictures for an Olmec-style statue with elephantine features. I am going to try to show these to you, but they are tough to see. INFO #1 was a very hard magazine to get any sort of quality from, and these are from pictures that I saved from rotting pages from Dick Hall's basement when I visited there [for a week] and cleaned the @#$%#* place up. Anyway, that's another story in UFOlogical history. Here are the photos.

Best I can do, folks. This basalt statue seems to represent a human/elephant combination. The sharp corners on the top of the head seem to indicate that it is an unfinished sculpture. That would be good enough to disregard it, but the thing seems to have both a trunk and elephantine ears. Whatever it is, it is in the Archaeological Museum in Mexico city now.

A. Hyatt Verrill did a dig in Cocle, Panama [Rio Cano area] which produced a huge variety of finds. I have a picture of the dig above, but can't find a picture of the elephant statue. Sorry, I'd like to see it, too. Almost everything that Verrill found here was interesting, but for our purposes, the "beautifully sculptured creatures not only with trunks and tusks, but with unmistakeable big leaf-like ears and the typical elephantine forward-bent joints of the hind legs..." are the items of choice. I have been amused to read other archaeologists' commenting on digs in central Panama, mentioning other things that Verrill found, and assiduously NOT mentioning the elephants.

Back to Michigan for a moment: As the map shows, my state swarms with Mastodon relics. I even have a tooth myself just for fun. With an environment loaded with the beasts, why not a population hanging on until quite recent times?? With that possibility in mind, let's see "the latest" find.

OK. It's like seeing faces in the clouds, or worse, pictures in Richard Shaver's Dero Rock Art. But this alleged glyph is supposed to be fairly clear to the diving team who discovered the boulder, and can examine it up close. So, until I hear differently, I'll keep this Traverse City, Michigan boulder in the running as a piece of "modern" mastodon evidence. It IS from Michigan, afterall.

What did Sanderson think? Ivan wrote an entire book about Elephants, one of his favorite critters. In it he broaches a lot of history, but stays away from any supportive statements about Mastodon or Mammoth survival. It seems that either he didn't buy it, or he felt that even if they did make it into historic times, they were all dead now, and so he couldn't "discover" any of them and wasn't much interested. What DID interest him, though, was the elephant on the Copan stele from Mayan cultural times. This was such an overpowering thing for Ivan that he became convinced that these elephants were IMPORTED into the Meso-American region from Africa or the Pacific. He actually favored Asia due to his belief that the carvings showed mahouts on top of the beasts. Somewhat boggled by the logistics of getting elephants across the Pacific Ocean [the West Africa-to-Brazil current is MUCH more obliging], he decided that these came the long way around from the near east through Africa and over. So, elephants there were; mastodons probably not.

Well, OK, Ivan, but I'm going to go back to my main man, William Berryman Scott, who started me into this mess. MANY years after he published that 19th century article in Scribners, Scott was asked about his 1940ish views on the subject. He said: it was his opinion that if the early Spanish explorers had more thoroughly penetrated into the American interior, they would have quite possibly encountered living mammoths.

There's a lot of smoke here. Maybe there's fire. So, I'm with you on this one WB.

At The Margins Of Cryptozoology, Part two.

Back to our mammoth problem.

Two years after Henry Mercer published The Lenape Stone, a real heavyweight academic, William Berryman Scott, not only had read it but was impressed. Scott is in profile on the right, and equally prestigious Henry Osborn "in attendance". Scott was the expert on North American mammals, having written the definitive work at that time.

This is an illustration from Scott's book.

Scott was also an idealist about the Search for the Truth [this is one of his paintings]. I mention this as I believe such idealists are more willing to choose information/data over the establishment cant, when entering into intellectual analyses of most any subject. Thus, two years after The Lenape Stone, W B Scott published a lengthy review of the debate in Scribner's Magazine: "American Elephant Myths".

In his review, Scott basically buys Mercer's view not only of the survival of mammoths/mastodons into relatively recent times, but also of most of the specifics that Mercer cites. He, for instance, simply pictures the Lenape Stone within a paragraph which reads:

" we have a number of unmistakeable portraits of the mammoth engraved on ivory and stone. One of these on ivory, from the Madelaine cave in France, is an exceedingly spirited and accurate drawing.

In America the evidence was long doubtful, but cannot be considered so any longer. Mastodon bones occur in this country in much more recent deposits than they do in Europe, often covered by only a few inches of soil or peat, and in a state of preservation as to make it difficult to believe that they are more than a few centuries old."

Scott continued in his review speaking of the legends and adding much on glyphic data from the high civilizations of Mexico and Central America. But he remains the scientist throughout, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Iowa pipes, and mentioning that the latest survey of the Elephant Mound of Wisconsin creates questions there as well. I'd like, however, to follow up a little on that.

The page with the Elephant Mound drawing above is from a report by Henry W. Henshaw in the Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report of 1884, one year prior to Mercer's work. It's from Ivan Sanderson's files.

Henshaw was another famous ethnologist and explorer and his opinion had weight. He viewed the Elephant Mound as being "by far the most important" of the effigy mounds. He disregarded the alternative animals like the peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo as being obviously wrong. He stated that "Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as has been proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time that these were thrown up..."

Henshaw then goes on to the critique of the mound's effigy however, and wonders aloud why there is no sign of ears or tail. [This is of no consequence to me, for what it's worth, as a thin tail is almost out of the question to represent in a mound and mastodon ears do not typically stick out even in modern representations of them]. The real point of controversy then settles where it should: on the "trunk". Here Henshaw hesitates, wishing that the trunk would be better formed. But he doesn't go all negative at this point either, shifting topic instead to debunking other claimants like the Iowa Elephant Pipes. Henshaw comes across as a fairly honest scholar, but a bit afraid to accept a forbidden thought.

Next up to the plate and swinging a mighty bashing club was Cyrus Thomas, he of the almost comical portrait of a man sucking on a lemon and not about to approve of any tomfoolery. Thomas was another ethnology giant of the era. He published an entire volume of the Bureau's annual reports in 1890, dedicated to an overview survey of American mounds. In it he thoroughly dispenses with the idea of an elephant being pictured here, opting instead for a bear. He even publishes a drawing of the mound without the trunk. How could he, you ask? He had come to the conclusion that the "trunk" was just some sort of "slippage" from the rest of the figure and not a true feature. Well, that was convenient.

Thomas' solution to the forbidden thought was written with confidence despite a quote in his own article from one Colonel Norris who surveyed it. Norris said in one place: "There is a depression some 4 or 5 feet deep between the trunk and breast". What Norris was trying to make us hear was that the builders had made a significant earth-moving hole to ensure that the trunk stood out as part of the effigy. Well, let's ignore that, I guess. It is also reported in Thomas' article that the more muted appearance of the "trunk" area was reported by some later observer who admitted that the farmer had plowed that area over several times. Nope, THAT surely couldn't have affected how that narrow feature stood out, could it? Undeterred by any of that, Thomas safely consigns the Elephant mound to a Bear, and publishes the drawing without trunk.

Well, I'm a bit undeterred by the august Mr. Thomas myself, and wonder just what's going on here. The above is a typically modern simplistic representation of a mastodon as you'd see on evolutionary tree diagrams of the pachyderms. I flipped its direction so as to be headed in the same way our mound creature is going.

Blackening our modern drawing out, we see, of course, that no ears stick out. We also see that it would have been fairly futile to represent the ropy tail. That leaves the trunk/tusk area: well.... are we lumpers or splitters? It's at least an honest debate isn't it? Since the testimony of the earlier surveyors seems to say that the "Trunk" is a genuine protrusion of the effigy, this wouldn't leave us with many alternative animals. And what I call the "Lip" is just as an elephant lover would hope it was. Well again.... it's your choice. And it certainly is not necessary to swallow Cyrus Thomas over W B Scott or Henry Mercer.

In the next and last section of this topic [what a relief, eh?], I'm going to take a fling at the story of the guy who walked the world of the time of the map above [1586]. And look at a smattering of other claimed evidence, and maybe get Ivan to tell me what he thought of it all.

Till then.

At The Margins Of Cryptozoology: Mastodons and Amerinds.

Hello again, folks. I've made my trek back to WVA, and am trying to get settled in. Weather hasn't cooperated and the old body aches too long into the day, but let's try to post something, despite feeling like that sleepy old mammoth in the picture.

Actually, I've probably picked a bad subject --- too big and complicated a mystery. But --- faithfully on!

The post was inspired by one of the articles that came from one of those bound old journals from the 19th century that I bought a few months ago. This was from the very first volume of Scribners Magazine 1897, "American Elephant Myths", by William Berryman Scott. Two things about this were immediately intriguing: this is probably the first review of this subject in the American intellectual press, and it is by an absolutely first class palaeontologist. In it Scott collects a large amount of soft evidence that indicates that human/mastodon or mammoth interactions were a real possibility, despite the accepted opinion that no such thing was possible [in America, anyway].

This whole story is a big messy tale, so beginning it is a problem. We'll save WB Scott's article for later and say some background things.

Once upon a time there were [at least] two types of big hairy elephant-like things [one hairier than the other] and they migrated into the Americas over the Bering Strait landbridge way back when. There were an awfully large number of these behemoths and the map above shows just some of the palaeontology digs which have unearthed their bones. Please note that "my" state, Michigan, is the Mastodon Center of the Universe. Archaeologists from my old school WMU used to go on digs to Native American sites and just as likely discover Mastodons instead.

The flourishing of the species is supposed to be about 20,000 years ago. Lower ocean levels at that time meant that the coast extended further outwards and bones have been found as much as 300km off shore. The beasts could stand as much as three man-heights tall and some dig sites have produced copious amounts of long hair, dun brown to amber in color, which apparently covered most of the body. They seem to have been, amazingly, tree-eaters, munching away at almost all parts of the pine trees, but favoring the bark. If climate changed sufficiently, they would either have to migrate to more densely forested land or die.

So, how'd they die... and when?

The death of the Mammoths/Mastodons is almost as complicated a mess as the alleged reasons for the death of the dinosaurs. Some say that the climate changed slowly but significantly enough that food was scarce and competition among themselves killed too many of a slowly reproducing species. Some say that climate changed so rapidly that the "clumsy" monsters fell down cliffs and pits and got mired in bogs and just couldn't move fast enough to find the remaining trees. I always have puzzled over how these animals could have been completely overtaken by snow and ice in Siberia so as to be frozen in state by the thousands. No B.S. that I've heard sounds realistic to me. And, as a grudging concession to commonsense, some academics think that we humans gradually hunted them to death, BUT ONLY VERY OLD HUMANS --- moderns need not apply. These extinctions, however they occurred, had to take place long ago circa 10,000 years BP, or the establishment cannot sleep well at night.

So now that we've been told what we must believe in order to pass the test, let's step back into time when the Big Bones began coming out of the ground and the battle to find orthodoxy was on.

In 1705 a five pound tooth was found near the Hudson River [NY] and immediately was seen as a Giant's tooth, Pre-Noachian, and therefore proof of the Genesis story. Others of course disagreed. The tooth and some subsequent big bones were viewed by them as being from some unknown creature of great size, which was dubbed the "Incognitum". Cotton Mather, however, stuck to the Biblical interpretation and viewed the species as the equivalent of the monstrous Og or at the least Goliath.

Sooner or later more complete amounts of bones came forward and it became impossible to rationally see this thing as humanoid. Finally a near complete specimen of a mammoth was reconstructed and put on show [for cash viewing] by a man named Peale. Although some still wanted to believe that this thing was either something entirely different on one hand, or merely a huge elephant on the other, the great palaeontologist Cuvier finally put a stop to that by showing why the animal was of the family of the pachyderms, but NOT a modern elephant. He viewed it as an ancient now extinct beast.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington thought differently in part. Cuvier's analysis was fine, but both thought that, partly for theological reasons, this animal probably still existed in the American West.  Some people say that the funding of the Lewis and Clark expedition was in part to discover these beasts.
         "In the present interior of our continent, there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions".  Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had more than just theology and big bones to buttress his beliefs. He knew that native american folklore of the Big Bone Lick area of the Ohio River [and elsewhere] believed that some very large and violent beast had interacted with tribes and wildlife, and accounted for the carnage that they felt the bonepiles at places like Big Bone Lick represented. The legend told that these animals were too powerful to defeat en masse and that it took a charitable and angry destruction by the high spirit [probably viewed by most of these tribes as Manitou, the Life-bringer] to do so. Interestingly to me, they have the only surviving beasts going back to Michigan, where all those mastodon bone finds occur. Jefferson also may have known about the ancient and still continuing Mammoth ivory trade coming out of Siberia, and the legends of living beasts there.

Somewhere during all of this a few "recent" tales begin to come out. The tale of David Ingram, from far back in 1586, surfaced again. More of that later. It is reported to Jefferson that a person back near those same times was captured by indians, and transported to a location where tales were told to him about existing mastodon-like beasts. A French officer in Louisiana in 1748 had heard a tale of a great beast terrorizing persons in Indiana at that time. And so wisps of smoke were out there on the horizons. Was there any fire?

As the 19th century progressed, and no Mastodons attacked, the establishment position firmed: Although there were mammoths and mastodons way back in pre-human-occupancy times, they all died off many years ago, and all we see are spectacular bones leading to made up stories. Then, in the latter part of the 19th century, the arguments opened up again.

All the above stuff seems pretty straightforward to me [though I've written it way too briefly], but now I'll probably get into personally-ignorant waters. My "study" of this stuff says to me that the reason that the late-surviving mastodon idea arose with any strength was the appearance of the Lenape Stone [above]. The stone was found in two sections at two widely separate dates in the same field by a young man [son of the farmer]. The dates of finding were 1872 and 1881. [The left two-thirds was found first and spent most of the intervening years in an indian-artifact "shoebox", of things which the boy found while farming these fields; all this in Pennsylvania's Bucks County]. Despite this being found by a completely naive amateur, the "provenance" is otherwise extremely good. This is because serious people interviewed everyone involved just like a good UFO field investigation would.

We owe this good work, regardless if it points to a genuine anomaly or not, to a fine early palaeontologist named Henry Chipman Mercer. Mercer was made aware of this peculiar stone gorget by the president [I believe] of the Bucks County Historical Society, which had acquired the artifact for two and a half bucks, and had it on display. This man, Captain J.S. Bailey, read a paper on the Stone in 1882, and Mercer became fascinated. By 1885 Mercer had collected information on this and related facts to the possible human/mastodon interactions occurring in recent past times, and published a short monograph, The Lenape Stone, or The Indian and the Mammoth.

You can read the monograph for yourself on the internet. In it Mercer gives a plausible scenario for buying the idea that:

#1: the stone is a genuine Delaware Indian, or predecessor, artifact, and not hoaxed by the farm family in whose field it was found.
#2: that Jefferson may have had good reason to believe the tale of a "Mr.Stanley" who was told by Indians of a beast much like an elephant that they had to fight.
#3: that other legends such as that of the Big Quis-quis monster of the Iroquois, the Oyahguaharh of the Tuscarora, the "Father of Oxen" of the Wyandot, and the Great Elk tradition of French Canada, all could be interpreted as memories of a very large and potent animal unlike those typically seen in those areas today.
#4: that the stone drawing eerily resembles the prehistoric drawing from La Madeliene in France. [shown in the picture above].

Mercer mentions the "recently excavated" elephant pipes from Louisa County Iowa [without confidence] and the Elephant Mound from Wisconsin [with]. He is completely aware of the objections to the stone's authenticity, and proceeds to address those issues objectively. The book is a good read by an honest seeker and a man enough within the establishment that it garnered genuine interest.

Lets look at the stone again.

Objections were made that the sketch did not seem like legitimate native american drawing. This, it turned out, was "white man talk", as when real native americans were asked about the drawing they said: yes, they could see an indian drawing that, but not the elephant --- that didn't belong there [because at Mercer's time, the local tribal people knew of no such thing in the environment].

A more serious objection was that the cuts seemed drawn with a metal instrument. This didn't hold up either because you can draw on such a sandstone with flint tools just fine with sharp cut accuracy... and although it wasn't mentioned, why couldn't the locals have had some fine piece of Great Lakes native copper to work with?

The last actual real objection was that the drawing seemed to be placed on the gorget after it was broken. This implied to the skeptics that someone found a broken plain indian gorget and, for reasons unknown, decided to sketch an indian/mastodon confrontation on it [bridging the break with a lightning bolt] and then throwing the pieces away in modern times, later to be found on turning soil up by the farmer. Well, that's a lot of dancing but not impossible. For someone who believes the scene portrayed to be the impossibility in the story, that dance will do to make the impossible go away.

Mercer knew about this. He accepted that the drawing DID look like it had occurred at least in part after the stone had broken. Mercer also realized that he was theorizing [but that everyone else was too] when he gave his own hypothesis: Gorgets are often found broken and almost always through one of the holes. Gorgets are usually plain, but some do have sketches on them. What if the "artist" was sketching on an intact gorget, say left to right, and when he got near the right hand hole, the thing broke? Maybe he throws it away. Maybe he's put enough work into it that he attempts to save it. Perhaps he uses one of the crude "glues" [sometimes even blood was used] to put the thing back together and continue to finish the sketch and the other side. The critics could then be correct: some of the sketch WAS done after the break, but the whole thing was conceived beforehand and so the objection may be irrelevant.

Mercer continued, therefore, to insist that the Lenape Stone was genuine and that it convincingly showed a fight between a "prehistoric" elephant and "recent" native americans, precisely in concert with the set of legends and tales which had surfaced during the past century.

Of course the establishment couldn't swallow it, but Mercer had argued so well that his unaccepted views never hindered his career. And shortly another even greater heavyweight, William Berryman Scott, would put his oar in the water to get this boat moving again. That story next time....

The Iowa Elephant Pipes--- more vehemently opposed by academia, and unhelpful to Mercer's cause.