Adams Mammoth - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Remains of various extinct elephants were known by Europeans for centuries, but were generally interpreted based on biblical accounts, as either the remains of behemoths or giants. It was also theorised that they were remains of modern elephants that had been brought to Europe during the Roman Empire, for example the war elephants of Hannibal the Great and Pyrrhus of Epirus, or had simply wandered north. The first woolly mammoth remains studied by European scientists were examined by Hans Sloane in 1728, and consisted of fossilised teeth and tusks from Siberia. Publishing his findings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sloane became the first to recognise that the remains did not belong to giants or behemoths, but rather to elephants. Sloane turned to another biblical explanation for the presence of elephants in the Arctic: he believed they had been buried during the biblical Great Flood, and that Siberia had previously been tropical prior to a drastic climate change. Others interpreted Sloane's conclusion slightly differently, arguing the flood had carried elephants from the tropics to the arctic. Sloane's paper was based on travellers' descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia and Britain. While he discussed the question of whether or not the mammoth was an elephant, he drew no conclusions. In 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant, but could not explain why a tropical animal would be found in such a cold area as Siberia; he suggested that they might have been transported there by Noah's flood.

It was French scientist Georges Cuvier who, in 1796, first identified the woolly mammoth remains not as modern elephants transported to the Arctic, but as an entirely new species. Most significantly, he argued this species had gone extinct and no longer existed, a concept that was not widely accepted at the time. Following Cuvier's identification, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave the woolly mammoth its scientific name in 1799, Elephas primigenius, placing it in the same genus as the Indian elephant. This name means "the first elephant". It was not until 1828 that Joshua Brookes recognised the species was distinct enough to warrant a new genus, and reclassified it as Mammuthus primigenius. It is unclear where and how the word "mammoth" itself originated. It may be a version of mehemot, which is the Arabic version of the biblical word behemoth. Another possible origin is Estonian, where maa means earth, and mutt means mole. The word was first used in Europe during the early 1600s, when referring tomaimanto tusks discovered in Siberia.