Pleistocene Animals in Folk Memory

Abstract

MAMMOTHS AND MANKIND LIVED TOGETHER in North America millennia ago. One human even carved the image of a mammoth on a shell, but because of geological ambiguity in the Delaware River Valley it is impossible to assign a precise date to the occurrence. It could be extraordinarily ancient artifact (circa 40,000 B.C.), but it is safer to assign a transitional Paleo-Archaic date to it (circa 8000 B.C.).1 The latter date will occasion little surprise among archaeologists, even though there is little actual documentation of the relation of mammoths and Homo sapiens. At unknown date the mammoths were gone (by 6000 B.C. at the latest), but Homo sapiens continued. In the wake of the Delaware River find, one archaeologist urged the examination of Native American legends for examples of the retention of the mammoth in oral tradition. She offered a Huron legend of a great Moose as an obvious attempt on the part of people who had never seen a mammoth or mastodon, and hence had no idea of its size, to relate the story of the largest animal they knew.2 This is by no means obvious, but it is not implausible idea, since the question of the retention of Pleistocene megafauna in Native American folktales has been continually debated by scholars for two centuries.