Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London/Volume 35/On the Range of the Mammoth in Space and Time

by William Boyd Dawkins

9. On the Range of the Mammoth in Space and Time. By W. Boyd Dawkins, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geology and Palæontology in Owens College. (Read November 6, 1878.)

Contents.

1. Introduction. 2. The Mammoth Preglacial in the South of England.
3. The Mammoth Preglacial in Scotland.
4. The Mammoth Preglacial in Cheshire.
5. The Mammoth a member of the Fauna of the Forest-bed.
6. The Mammoth Postglacial and Glacial in Britain.
7. Range in Europe, Asia, and America.
8. Relation to Indian Elephant.

1. Introduction.

The Mammoth is one of the most important animals for purposes of classification, on account of the large size and abundance of its remains, and because of its range in ancient times over more than one half of the land-surface of the world. According to some authorities, among whom may be reckoned M. Lartet^[1], it is taken to characterize an early stage in the history of the Palæolithic caverns of France and Belgium, and according to others, among whom may be reckoned Dr. James Geikie^[2], to have found its way into Europe after the Glacial period; it is supposed to have disappeared from Europe before the close of the Glacial period. In Dr. Falconer's^[3] opinion it was a Pre- as well as a Postglacial inhabitant of Britain, a view which I was unable to accept on the evidence offered at that time^[4]. The new materials, however, accumulated during the last ten years render it advisable to reexamine the evidence by the light of a wider experience. The results of a reexamination which are brought before the Society this evening show that Dr. Falconer's conclusion as to the Mammoth being Preglacial in Britain is fully justified; and the additional details brought together since his death merely serve to fill in to some extent the picture of the life and times of the mammoth, without affecting the outlines drawn by the hand of the master^[5]. They show that the animal lived in Cheshire and the South of England, and probably also in Scotland, before the deposition of the Boulder-clays by glaciers and icebergs, and that it roamed over the region now covered by the North Sea, in company with the Elephas meridionalis, Cervus Sedgwickii ( = C. dicranios, Nesti), and other animals of the forest-bed of Norfolk and Suffolk.

 

2. The Mammoth Preglacial in the South of England.

The first case to be examined is that of the elephant found in Sussex. The memorable paper of Mr. Godwin-Austen, on "The Newer Tertiary Deposits of the Sussex Coast," brought before the Society in 1857^[6], called attention to the fact that a layer of glacial clay with erratics, some of very large size, was to be seen in the low and broken line of cliffs extending from Pagham Harbour on the east, past the little village of Selsea, to Bracklesham on the west, and that this rested on a deposit of estuarine mud, below which were lenticular patches of red ferruginous gravel lying on the eroded surface of the Eocene strata. In "the mud-bed," from time to time, many bones and teeth of elephant, found in juxtaposition, prove that whole carcasses had decayed in this spot. These were originally assigned to the mammoth; but on subsequent examination by Dr. Falconer they turned out to belong to his new species, the narrow- toothed, straight-tusked Elephas antiquus. Although the mammoth has been quoted from this horizon in 1870^[7] by Mr. Godwin-Austen, and in 1878 by the editors of the new edition of Dixon's 'Geology of Sussex,' I am unable to obtain any further evidence on the point, and it is very probable that the species is not the mammoth, but the Elephas antiquus.

Whatever doubts may be thrown on the occurrence of the mammoth in Preglacial strata at Selsea, its presence in Hertfordshire before the period of the Boulder-clay was proved in 1858^[8] by the discovery, by Prof. Prestwich, of a tooth and tusk in a bed of gravel underneath the Boulder-clay of Bricket Wood in the railway-cutting between Watford and St. Albans. The animal, therefore, was living within the area of the London Basin before it was submerged beneath the sea, on which the icebergs were carried as far south as the line of the Thames, or, in other words, before the time when the drift of icebergs in Britain arrived at its maximum extension to the south. In this sense, then, it may be said to be Preglacial in the South of England.

 

3. The Mammoth Preglacial in Scotland.

Several cases of the discovery of its remains in the Boulder-clays and subjacent deposits render it very probable that it was also an inhabitant of Scotland in Preglacial times. Nine or ten tusks and a molar tooth have been discovered from time to time, in a peaty clay underneath the "till," at Woodhill quarry^[9], Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, along with the antlers of reindeer, and various insects and freshwater plants (pond-weed and ranunculus), under conditions shown in the following section (fig. 1). From their position below the Boulder-clay these remains are considered by Dr. Bryce, from whose paper the above section is borrowed, as well as by Mr. Young, to be preglacial. Dr. James Geikie, however, refers this stratum of Boulder-clay to the later^[10] of the two Scotch Boulder-clays, and places the stratum with the mammoth in his "Interglacial period." A second example of the discovery of mammoth in association with the Boulder-clays is that of a tusk found, at a depth of fifteen to twenty feet from the surface, by the eminent engineer Mr. Bald^[11], at Clifton Hall, in the valley of the Forth, at the beginning of this century. A third instance is offered also by the remains at Chapel Hall, near Airdrie, in laminated sand under the "till." These cases are taken by Mr. Jamieson to prove that the mammoth lived in Scotland before Glacial conditions had set in in Northern Britain; and his conclusion seems to me to be probably true.

Fig. 1.—Section of Drift-beds at Kilmaurs.

1. Sandstone of the Coal-formation,⁠ ⁠rising in a low cliff from the ⁠hanks of Carmel Water.	3. Clay. 4. Sand. 5. Boulder-clay.
2. Gravel.	6. Upper Drifts.
7. Subsoil and surface-soil.

 

4. The Mammoth Preglacial in Cheshire.

If, however, the true relation of the strata with mammoths in the above cases to the lowest Glacial deposits of Scotland be considered doubtful, the Preglacial age of the mammoth in Cheshire is definitely set at rest by the discovery made by Mr. Bloxsom in March 1878, in sinking a shaft for the new Victoria Salt Co. near Northwich. The travelling cylinder used in the operation cut through the fossil-tooth of "some gigantic animal," which was sent to me for identification. It proved, on comparison with remains in the British Museum, to be a fragment of the last lower true molar of the mammoth, left side, composed of the last seven plates with the talon, and measuring 5⋅5 inches long by 2⋅5 and 1⋅8 broad. From an examination of the matrix it had evidently been imbedded in a fine sand highly charged with dark carbonaceous particles.

The precise conditions of its discovery are shown in the following section (fig. 2), the details of which have been furnished by the kindness of Mr. Bloxsom. The tooth was found at a depth of sixty-five feet from the surface of the ground, in the sand No. 1, at the point marked A in the figure.

The overlying Boulder-clay, as may be seen from the horizontal geological section, sheet 64, made by Prof. Hull, extends without a break from Northwich to Aston; it reappears near Millington Hall, and extends, except where it is cut through by the river Bollin, under the middle-drift sand and gravel of Bowdon, and thence in a north-easterly direction over Manchester, until it plunges under the same series of sands at Cheetham Hill. These middle sands in their turn are capped by the upper Boulder-clay of Newton, Fairfield, and Droylesden to the east of Manchester. The Boulder-clay of Northwich, therefore, is the lower of the two Boulder-clays of the Lancashire and Cheshire plain, and the sand beneath it with the mammoth belongs to a yet earlier age, or, in other words, is older than the first phase of the Glacial period, of which traces have been met with on the western side of the Pennine chain.

Fig. 2.—Section of New Victoria Salt-Company's Shaft, Northwich.
(Scale 1/30 inch to 1 foot.)

 

Soil, 2 feet.

3. Brown sand and clay, 9 feet.

 

2. Brown Boulder-clay of Lower Series, 37 feet.

 

1. Quicksand, with layers of pebbles, 32 feet.
⁠A = Mammoth tooth.

 

Red Marl of Keuper, 16 feet.
⁠(72 feet to Rock-salt.)

The series of sands and gravels underneath the lower Boulder-clay has been proved by Mr. Binney^[12] to be very persistent in Lancashire underneath the lower Boulder-clay, resting very generally on the eroded surface of the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic rocks. A section recently exposed close to Birch Church, Rusholme, proves that it is more than fifteen feet thick on the south side of Manchester. The sharp sand and rounded pebbles of which it is composed render its marine origin very probable, the only fossil hitherto discovered in it being the tooth above described.

The remains of the mammoth have been found on the borders of the Lancashire and Cheshire district; in Derbyshire, in a cleft of the Mountain Limestone at Dove Holes near Buxton (Binney); in a cave at Gelly Dale near Castleton (Pennington and myself); and in Staffordshire at Copenhall near Crewe, in a cutting of the London and North-western Railway (Sir P. Egerton). In all these cases the relation of the deposit in which the remains were found to the Boulder-clays is uncertain.

 

5. The Mammoth a member of the Fauna of the Forest-bed.

The Mammoth was considered by Dr. Falconer to be a member of the peculiar fauna of the Preglacial Forest-bed, because its remains were met with in the same mineral condition as the other Forest-bed Mammalia cast up by the sea at the foot of the Norfolk cliffs. In 1868^[13] I saw reason to doubt this conclusion, and to believe that they were derived from the Postglacial gravels on the top of the cliffs, or from the late Pleistocene ossiferous deposit on the Dogger Bank. Since that time, however, I have been led, from the examination of specimens which Dr. Falconer never saw, and from a consideration of the associated fauna, to hold that his judgment in this case is probably correct. The objection that the animal may have been derived from newer deposits is met by the fact that the Forest-bed fauna contains no less than eighteen out of a total of twenty-six mammals which are proved to have been its contemporaries by discoveries in other places. The mammoth, as Dr. Falconer pointed out, was of an elastic constitution, so that its presence in a group of animals not now living in cold countries is not rendered improbable by its habits of life. The probability also is considerably strengthened by the fact of its being proved to have been an inhabitant of Britain before the Glacial period, from the above-mentioned discoveries in the south and west of England and in Scotland.

 

6. The Mammoth in Britain before, during, and after the Glacial period.

In the late Pleistocene deposits of Britain the mammoth is the most abundant animal, being found in eighty-two cases out of 148 localities tabulated^[14] in an essay brought before this Society in 1869, and very generally along with the reindeer. Some of the river-deposits, such as those of Hoxne and Bedford, are clearly of Postglacial age, in the sense of being after the layer of Boulder-clay, considered by Mr. Searles Wood the newer of the two clays. It has also been found in abundance in the lower brick-earths of the Thames valley, at Ilford, Erith, and Crayford, which probably belong to a period before the Glacial age^[15]. It is also, as has been shown in the preceding pages, Preglacial in Cheshire, Hertfordshire, and Norfolk, and probably also in Scotland. From these considerations it follows that, while the temperature was becoming sufficiently lowered to allow of large masses of ice depositing their burdens over Britain north of the Lower Severn and the Thames, the animal would be pushed southwards into other districts where the climate was not so severe. In other words, it may be termed Glacial. When the conditions of life became less severe the animal found its way along the river-valleys of this country as far north as Yorkshire on the east, and the line of the Trent and Holyhead on the west. North of this line it is conspicuous by its absence from Postglacial deposits of sand and gravel. For this I should be inclined to account on the hypothesis that this area was defended from the invasion of the mammoths, and, it may be added, of the associated animals^[16], by a system of glaciers radiating from the hills of Wales, Cumberland, the Pennine Chain, and Scotland, which did not melt away much before the mammoth became extinct, and possibly also by a submergence of the low districts.

In these remarks ossiferous caverns containing the remains of the mammoth have purposely been omitted, because it is impossible to tell with certainty their precise relation to the Glacial period.

 

7. Range in Europe, Asia, and America.

The caverns and river-deposits of France present us with traces of the mammoth in enormous abundance, and the animal is known to have ranged into Spain^[17], from the discovery of specimens in the zinc-mines of Santander. Thanks to M. Lartet and Dr. Falconer, it has long been known to have lived in the neighbourhood of Rome at a time when the volcanoes of Central Italy were active, and poured currents of lava and threw clouds of ashes over the site of the imperial city. It is abundant in northern and southern Germany, but it has not been found north of a line passing through Hamburg, or in any part of Scandinavia or Finland. It occurs in the auriferous gravels of the Urals; and in Siberia, as is well known, it formerly existed in countless herds, being buried in the morasses in large numbers, in the same manner as the Irish Elks at the bottom of the Irish peat-bogs. The admirable preservation of some of the carcasses is undoubtedly due to their having been entombed directly after death, and then quickly frozen up, a process which need not necessarily imply, as Mr. Howorth has lately suggested that it does imply, climatal conditions unlike those of the present time in Siberia. In unusually warm springs, the warm waters borne down by the great rivers from their southern warm sources thaw the frozen morasses with incredible rapidity, so that the hard ice-bound "tundra" becomes quickly converted into a treacherous bog. In the exceptionally warm season of 1846^[18], the mammoth discovered by Lieut. Benkendorf on the banks of the Indigirka was thawed out of the tundra until it was revealed to the astonished eyes of the beholder, standing on its feet in the position in which it had been bogged. Had any elks or reindeer been in that spot at that time they might have been entombed in the same way, and preserved by the frosts of the winter till they were liberated again by the rare chance of their place of sepulture being invaded by warm floods from the south. The thaw in that year proceeded so rapidly that Lieut. Benkendorf and his Cossacks narrowly escaped the alternative of being entombed in the soft morass, or of being swept out northwards into the Arctic Sea, as his mammoth was, to join the vast assembly of mammoths and reindeer and other animals which have been swept down in a similar fashion.

The remains of the animal occur throughout Russian Asia; and the singular notice of fossil ivory being brought for sale at Khiva, by an enterprising Arabian traveller, Abou-el-Cassim, in the middle of the tenth century, applies to the mammoth from the old Bulgaria on the Lower Volga^[19].

Nor is a variety of the mammoth absent from Asia Minor, since the remains of an elephant (E. armeniacus), discovered near Erzeroum, have been determined by Dr. Falconer to be intermediate between the mammoth and the Indian elephant. And it is an interesting fact to note that in Asia Minor, as in the Pleistocene of Europe, it is associated with the horse, stag, bison, and woolly (?) rhinoceros, all of which are described by Dr. Brandt from Persia in 1870.

The elephant^[20] was living in the valley of the Euphrates in the sixteenth century before Christ, when that district was invaded by the Egyptians, since a great hunting of elephants by the Pharaoh, Thothmes III., in the neighbourhood of Nineveh, has been recorded in an Egyptian inscription published by M. Chabas. This important discovery brings Elephas armeniacus into the same geographical region as the Indian elephant (whichever variety or species those in question may have been), and shows that the fossil and living elephants of Asia in ancient times were not separated from each other by impassable geographical barriers or wide spaces of mountain and desert.

The animal ranged over the whole of North America, from the frozen cliffs of Eschscholtz Bay as far south as the Isthmus of Darien—the Elephas americanus of Leidy^[21] and the E. Columbi^[22] of Falconer (E. texianus, Owen) being mere varieties of the same sort as those observable in the European mammoths, founded merely on the relative width and coarseness of the plates composing the grinders; while the E. Jacksoni of Billings merely supplies a slight variation in the form of the lower jaw.

Thus the mammoth ranged in ancient times over nearly the whole of the land of the northern hemisphere; and it is most important to note a singular fact in the distribution of the varieties with grinders composed respectively of narrow and wide plates. Just as in Euro-Asia the variety with its grinders composed of narrow plates has its headquarters in the north, and is replaced in Asia Minor by the variety with wide plates in its grinders (the E. armeniacus of Dr. Falconer), so in America is the narrow-plated form replaced in the southern parts of the continent by the E. Columbi. These differences may be the result of the use of different food in the northern and southern regions.

 

8. Relation to Indian Elephant.

The next point to be considered is the relation of the mammoth to the Indian elephant on the other side of the barrier of deserts and mountains of Central Asia. On analyzing all the characters of the dentition, wo find that the ridge-formula and the succession of the teeth are the same, and that the last grinders are so alike that a lower molar of E. indicus has been figured by one of our most distinguished anatomists as that of a mammoth^[23]. In Dr. Falconer's classification, Elephas Columbi, E. indicus, and E. armeniacus are grouped together, their teeth being built on the same plan^[24], "Colliculi approximati, machæridibus valde undulatis;" while next to them comes E. Primigenius, "Colliculi confertissimi, adamante valde attenuato, machæridibus vix undulatis." The differences expressed in these definitions seem to me to be merely of degree, and not of kind. Nor are the differences in the skeletons greater than those of the dentition. The possession of hair and wool depends, to a large extent, on climate, so that the covering of the Siberian mammoth cannot be taken to be a specific character.

On the present evidence the two seem to me to be so closely related that the mammoth may be taken as the ancestor of the Indian elephant; and it is highly probable that the latter has put on those trifling characters by which it is distinguished in the untold ages of its sojourn in the tropical forests of India—characters, be it remembered, of the same order as those observed in the dentition of Elephas Columbi of the warmer regions of North America, and the E. armeniacus of Asia Minor. I feel inclined to view them as two well-marked varieties rather than as two distinct species.

 

Discussion.

Dr. Leith Adams stated that teeth from Ohio in the Royal College of Surgeons and in Paris were certainly those of the Mammoth, although Prof. Marsh has asserted that the Mammoth has not been found south of the Columbia river and east of the Rocky Mountains. He thought it possible that Elephas Columbi, E. armeniacus, and E. indicus might be the same species, but that E. primigenius was distinctly different. The Mammoth was more nearly allied to the Asiatic than any other elephant. He gave instances of thick- and thin-plated teeth occurring in the same district in Britain; in none did we, however, get crowns like the teeth of the Indian elephant. Hence he did not think there was evidence at present for running all these species together.

Mr. Charlesworth commented on some popular representations of the Mammoth; and asked if Prof. Dawkins thought the elephant's teeth in the Norwich Crag were those of E. primigenius.

Prof. Owen asked whether the evidence for the discovery of the tooth of E. primigenius under the Lower Boulder-clay was satisfactory, instancing mistakes that had been made in the case of Cervus megaceros, which had been asserted, though on defective evidence, to occur in the peat-bogs, whereas it appeared that really it was in the underlying shell-marl.

Mr. J. Evans said that a Committee had been appointed at the last Meeting of the British Association at Dublin to investigate the occurrence of the Cervus megaceros in Ireland. He would have been glad if Prof. Boyd Dawkins had also attempted to trace the pedigree of the Mammoth upwards as well as downwards. He could not accept Mr. Howorth's view of a cataclysmic cause for the destruction of the Siberian Mammoth and the preservation of its remains.

Prof. Seeley stated that Dr. Falconer considered Elephas primigenius very closely allied to E. indicus; in fact he always examined the mineral character of the specimen, as the speaker had seen when he went over a large collection made by Prof. Sedgwick, and contained in the Woodwardian Museum.

Dr. Hicks asked as to the nature of the Boulder-clay and whether the blocks contained in it were angular or rounded. He inquired whether the evidence was sufficiently satisfactory that it belonged to the Lower Boulder-clay, and was not simply derived from it in subsequent changes.

Prof. Hughes said that he doubted the glacial origin of any of the series of deposits described by Prof. Boyd Dawkins, and stated that the Boulder-clays of Cheshire only belonged to the later part of the Glacial epoch. They were marine and resorted. He thought the same of the Hertfordshire drift.

Dr. Woodward said that he had recently been along the Norfolk coast with Mr. Gunn, who still adhered to his opinion that Elephas primigenius was not found in the Forest-bed. He called attention to the probable commingling of Indian and African types in the valley of the Euphrates, as shown by the Assyrian sculptures.

Prof. Boyd Dawkins, in answer to Prof. Owen, said that the section of the deposits near Northwich in which the Mammoth tooth was found was made by the engineer who had made the boring and had sent him specimens; and he gave reasons for holding that the Boulder-clay was not remanié, but the true Lower Boulder-clay. It contains numbers of large striated blocks from Cumberland and Scotland, and no marine shells. That was the case in the clay he had described, which extended from Northwich to Manchester, and had nothing to do with that of Cheshire referred to by Prof. Hughes. He did not know that there was any important difference between the blocks in the Upper and Lower Boulder-clay. He thought that if Prof. Leith Adams would examine the teeth in the museums of Florence, Bologna, and Lyons, he would find that the narrow-plated Mammoth teeth did shade off into wide-plated varieties, and that the species was not so definite as he appeared to think. As regarded Cervus megaceros, it occurred in Ballybetale bog in peaty mud above the clay, and extended up to close below the upper friable peat. The elephant of the Crag was probably E. meridionalis.

1. Comptes Rendus, xlvi. Séance 22 Février, 1858.
2. 'Ice Age.'
3. Palæont. Mem. ii. p. 240.
4. Popular Science Review, 1868, p. 275; Geological Magazine, July 1868.
5. Palæont. Mem. ii. p. 239.
6. Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. (1857), xiii. p. 50.
7. Ibid. (1871), xxvii. p. 26.
8. Geologist, 1858, p. 268.
9. Dr. Bryce, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxi. p. 213; Mr. J. Young, 'The Antiquity of Man,' p. 292 (last edit.); Prof. Archibald Geikie, "Phen. of Glacial Drift of Scotland," Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow, i. part ii.
10. Dr. James Geikie, 'Ice Age,' 2nd edit. p. 160.
11. Mr. Bald, Wernerian Soc. Mem. Edinb. iv. p. 58.
12. Proceedings Lit. and Phil. Soc. Manchester, 19 March and 12 Nov. 1872; Statistical Society of Manchester, 1841.
13. "Range of the Mammoth," Pop. Sci. Rev. 1868, p. 285; "The Age of the Mammoth," Geol. Mag. v., July 1868.
14. Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxv. p. 192 et seq.
15. Ibid, xxiii. p. 91 et seq.
16. Dawkins, 'Cave-hunting,' p. 400.
17. The other localities in Spain for the mammoth, given by Prof. Calderon (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxxiii. p. 129), are doubtful, because the proboscidean remains in Miocene and Pliocene strata, referred by various Spanish authors to that species, are accepted without criticism. Those from Santander have been described by Prof. Sullivan and O'Reilly, and determined by Prof. Leith Adams to belong to the mammoth.
18. Middendorf, 'Sibirische Reise,' iv. 'Die Thierwelt Sibiriens,' p. 1082. 4to. 1867. This account is translated in my essay on the "Range of the Mammoth" quoted above.
19. 'Les Peuples du Caucase, ou Voyage d'Abou-el-Cassim,' par M. C. D'Ohsson, page 80. "On trouve souvent dans la Boulgarie des os (fossiles) d'une grandeur prodigieuse. J'ai vu une dent qui avait deux palmes de large sur quatre de long, et un crâne qui ressemblait a une hutte (arabe). On y déterre des dents semblables aux défenses d'éléphants, blanche comme la neige et pesant jusqu' à deux cents menns. On ne sait pas à quel animal elles ont appartenu, mais on les transporte dans le Khoragur (Kiva), où elles se vendent à grand prix. On en fait des peignes, des vases et d'autres objets, comme on façonne l'ivoire; toutefois cette substance est plus dure que l'ivoire; jamais elle ne se brise."

    This is extracted by the learned D'Ohsson from an Arabic manuscript of the middle of the tenth century.

20. Chabas, 'Études sur l'Antiquité Historique d'apres les sources égyptiennes,' 2nd edit. p. 124.
21. 'U.S. Geol. Survey of the Territories,' F. V. Hayden, vol. i.; Leidy, 'Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of W. Territories,' p. 238.
22. For the details relating to these forms, see Falconer, Pal. Mem. ii. p. 212.
23. Owen, Brit. Foss. Mammals, fig. 90.
24. Pal. Mem. ii. p. 14