The first written reference to mammoths is in the Shên I King, a book by Tang-fang So, a minister of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, who ruled China from 140 to 87 BCE. He wrote of the k'i shu, a gigantic, rodent-like creature that lived beneath the ice of the frozen north: “Its flesh weighs a thousand pounds and may be used as dried meat for food… its hair is about eight feet in length, and is made into rugs, which are used as bedding and to keep out the cold. The hide of the animal yields a covering for drums, the sound of which is audible over a distance of a thousand miles.” Eating mammoth flesh, he noted, was believed to be a remedy for fevers.
Frozen mammoth carcasses didn’t remain intact in the warmer climates of Europe and Africa, but their bones were still to be found, and people tried to come up with explanations for them.
The early Catholic theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, who lived from A.D. 354 to 430, cited the discovery of an immense tooth―which some suspect actually belonged to a mammoth―as proof of the existence of the giants mentioned in the Old Testament. The “giants” theory persisted through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
When what probably was a mammoth skeleton was unearthed in France in 1613, a physician named Pierre Mazurier examined the bones and proclaimed that they were the remains of Teutobochus, a legendary 30-foot-tall German king of antiquity. Others argued that enormous bones found in Europe belonged to mythical creatures such as unicorns.
Nicolaas Witsen, a Dutch politician, writer, and shipbuilder who journeyed to Russia to lend his expertise to the czar Peter the Great’s navy, may have been the first westerner to actually examine the thawed flesh of a mammoth. In his 1695 travelogue Noord en Oost Tartarye, he wrote of seeing the dark brown, smelly remains of an immense Siberian creature called the “mammout,” which, if spotted in the wild, “betokens much calamity.” Witsen speculated that the creature was a mystical relative of the Behemoth, a beast with twisting horns in the biblical Book of Job.
But the czar himself subscribed to another theory that was gaining in popularity among European intellectuals: the remains belonged to elephants, perhaps from the armies of Alexander the Great, the Carthaginian general Hannibal, or some other ancient commander.
In 1728, the British anatomist Hans Sloane examined fossil teeth and tusks from Siberia and concurred that they came from elephants. Sloane also came up with an alternate theory to explain how the remains of creatures normally found in the tropics had ended up so far to the north. He wrote that Siberian settlers believed that the region had a warmer climate in the days before the great flood described in the biblical Book of Genesis, and that the deluge washed the mammoths’ bodies into subterranean cavities.