Mammoth Undertakings.(THE FATE OF THE MAMMOTH; TIME TRAVELER)(Brief Article)

In 413 A.D., Saint Augustine wrote of the discovery of an enormous tooth on the Mediterranean shore: "If it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it." He went on: "For though the bodies of ordinary men were larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature." Fossil relics, Claudine Cohen points out in THE FATE OF THE MAMMOTH (Chicago), newly translated from the French by William Rodarmor, were not infrequently taken as evidence of a prehistoric, super-tall human race. Elephant bones in particular spurred the imagination--the hollowed nasal cavity in the skull of the now-extinct dwarf elephant was thought to be the eye socket of a Cyclops; the mammoth's ivory tusk, the spiralled horn of a unicorn. The myths persisted for centuries; when Lewis and Clark headed west, Thomas Jefferson expressed ...