I think I asked this question before but don’t remember
if I got an answer: About 6 months ago I saw the Discovery
documentary “Rasing the Mammoth”, and it got me wondering.
ARe there any people, especially around the Arctic where, presumably, mammoths last held forth, who “remember” mammoths in their legends? Or put another way, for example,
I know about mammoths because I’ve read about them in books and seen fossils at the L.A. County Museum of Natural History. But are there people anywhere on the planet who
know about them not from books or museums, but from from
cultural memories handed down to them? You would think that
something that big wouldn’t be forgotten, even after 10K years.
Short answer: nobody can really say (unsatisfactory, I know, but that’s the short answer to a lot of questions).
Longer answer: despite the claims of some (principally with an ideological axe to grind, or those ignorant enough not to realize that an axe needs sharpening), human memory is pretty fallible. The memories of anything fade into legend, with a relability quotient that is usually indistinguishable from zero. Consider the badly distorted way in which the Thera explosion (more recent, and much more impressive, than a mere mastodon) is reflected in the Atlantis legend.
Reality check: Paleolithic peoples must certainly have words for “mastodon”, “mammoth”, “woolly rhinoceros”, “flat-faced bear”, etc. (they certainly didn’t say to each other, “Let’s sneak up on the…erm, big hairy thing with the tusks”). Yet none of those words is remembered today in any Nostratic[sup]1[/sup] or Amerind language. Not surprisingly, they were dropped as useless, or reallocated to musk oxen or something, when they were no longer needed to discuss mastodons, etc.
[sup]1[/sup]I don’t consider the Nostratic hypothesis well-founded, but saying “Nostratic” beats trying to rattle off the names of a score or two of obscure peri-Arctic languages.
I did hear somewhere that a certain American Indian group has, or had, legends about their ancestors hunting creatures
“tall as trees”, though that could have been something propounded by
one of your axe-grinders. One reason I thought stories might have persisted was because until Europeans came to
the New World, most of the locals were still living a hunting and gathering lifestyle. This would have made hunting extremely important in their culture which would,
presumably, give legends concerning immense beasts that could feed the group for week greater staying power.
I never thought much of the Atlantis-Thera explanation. I always figured that Plato was just writing a little bit of SF.
Oh, and what language group is Nostratic?
Perhaps it is because we are looking at the wrong oral histories.
From Biodiversity and Conservation, by Peter J. Bryant, University of California, Irvine
It would appear that New World civilizations would have had little opportunity to form legends about mammoths. The new hunters simply wiped them soon after arriving in the New World, and they were never an important food source.
Indiginous cultures in Central Europe have been assimilated, and their oral histories have been lost. Perhaps some isolated Asian cultures, such as the Siberian Yup’ik may still have such legends, but this is just a guess.
The reports of Pleistocene mammoth/mastodon extinction are, like Mark Twain’s death, overexaggerated. A group of mammoths, somewhat pygmified, survived on Wrangell Island off Siberia until about 6000 BC. And there are subfossil remains of the mastodon Cordilleron from South America dating to about 300 AD. I am not aware, however, of any legends from either Siberia or S.A. relating to the living creatures. (I suspect we have all encountered reports of the “giant gopher” stories of the Tungus, derived from finding dead mammoths buried in the permafrost.)
javaman asks:
Actually the other way around, so to speak.
Nostratic is the name given to a proposd “superfamily” or “macrofamily” of languages including Indo-European, Uralic (Finnish, Samoyed, etc.), Altaic (Turkish, etc.), Kartvelian (Georgian, etc.), and perhaps some others: Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) and Dravidian are sometimes assigned to it, as are Eskimo-Aleut and a lot of obscure (IMHO) Siberian languages.
But remember, the earliest New Worlders didn’t spring full blown from the rocks, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
They migrated gradually over the land bridge, with little
if any comprehension of where they were going. Since
they were presumably for the most part Paleo Siberians, we
must assume that they, too, had been hunting mammoths for
ages beforehand.
OK, another thing. Think about, say, Northwest Coast indians. Well, they have stories about dozens and dozens of mythological creatures…thunderbirds, sisuitls (two headed sea monsters), sasquatches, etc, etc. If your g-g-g-g-g-grandpa tells you a story about a giant animal that they used to hunt back in the old days, it would soon be conflated with all the other mythological critters.
Also, there were all kinds of other animals living in North America that went extinct, and none of them are recorded in oral history either…not even horses.