Prehistory is the time of endings. For the last time, different species of human beings lived together – eight, of which only one survives: us, Homo sapiens. It was also the time when most of the inhabitants of the planet abandoned nomadism, hunting and gathering as a way of life, to devote themselves to agriculture, livestock and building cities. And then the kings and the priests began. It also represented the end of a long ice age and a radical change in climate. Then, as now, many people saw how, little by little, the places they knew and that had allowed them to survive for generations were flooded and vanished under the waves as the deserts advanced. And then, as now, many animal species became extinct.
Of all of them, one continues to fascinate us above the others, because it embodies both the strength and fragility of nature, because it reminds us that other beings were here, before us, and disappeared. Mammoths, those giants of the Ice Age —although they adapted to numerous climates and latitudes—, star in an exhibition at CaixaForum in Madrid, which has previously passed through other Spanish cities, and have a central role in the latest novel by Spanish writer Álex Prada, La parte softa de la montaña (Seix Barral), or in the recent essay by American researcher Dan Flores Wild New World. The Epic Story of Animals and People in America (W. W. Norton & Company).
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"It is a real animal and at the same time supernatural," writes the French prehistorian Marylène Patou-Mathis in Histoires de Mammouth (Fayard). "Contemporary of our ancestors, it belongs to the past, but still lives in our imaginary," continues the author of Prehistoric Man is also a Woman (Lumen). Mammoths represent a powerful cultural icon, recalls Patou-Mathis, from Manny, one of the three protagonists of the animated films The Ice Age, to Rahan's comics or numerous exhibitions that have toured the world in recent decades.
In The War of Fire, a novel that in 1911 shaped the vision of prehistory at a time when many discoveries about the remote past of humanity were still to be made, the Belgian brothers who signed as J.-H. Rosny described mammoths as allies of Homo sapiens in their fight against another human species devouring human flesh. "They knew the owners of the land," he writes in this novel that was made into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud under the title In Search of Fire. "The column of clay-colored giants, with their rough furs, was placed along the pond and began to drink with such power that the water began to drop in level."
Cave painting of a mammoth in the Cave of Rouffignac, France.
This image summarizes everything that mammoths represent in the imaginary of prehistory, a kind of calm force that should not be faced without sufficient weapons and organization. However, they disappeared like all that world of giant creatures that Antonio Monclova describes in the book The first megafauna: The exciting story of the most fabulous and strange mammals that inhabited the Earth after the extinction of the dinosaurs (Almuzara). It was a process that lasted for tens of thousands of years. When the last mammoths disappeared about 4,000 years ago, taking refuge on the Arctic island of Wrangel (now in Russia), humanity had begun the long journey of the Neolithic and there was not much left – in prehistoric terms – for the construction of pyramids and the invention of writing. They were killed by global warming, but more and more experts think so is human intervention.
"The end of glacial climates may have affected northern species such as woolly mammoths," Dan Flores, an American wildlife expert and author of a classic essay, Coyote America, said by email. "But, like modern elephants, southern mammoth species (such as Columbians) adapted to warm climates. The end of the Ice Age did not affect them and yet they also disappeared. I think humans had a lot to do with the extinction of mammoths all over the planet, but they probably didn't literally kill them all. Instead, it is likely that the last dispersed populations succumbed (as happened on Wrangel Island) to the decline in genetic diversity, which eventually made reproduction impossible. The term for that is "genetic fusion."
This extinction, relatively recent, is related to two of the great current problems of humanity: climate change, which brings us closer to what the journalist David Wallace-Wells has called The inhospitable planet (Debate), but also to how the constant action of human beings is making life increasingly difficult for many other species in what the American author Elizabeth Kolbert has called The sixth extinction (Criticism).
Model of a 'Mammuthus primigenius', in the exhibition 'Mammoth. The giant of the Ice Age'. JUAN BARBOSA
For Darío Fidalgo, paleontologist at the Department of Paleobiology of the National Museum of Natural Sciences, dependent on the Higher Center for Scientific Research (CSIC), our fascination with mammoths has a lot to do both with their monumentality and with the vision – quite apocalyptic – that they offer us of our own present. "We find in mammoths two necessary ingredients to succeed in our collective imagination," he explains. "These animals, for many millennia, were the largest to have populated the land surface of Europe, Asia and America. But, along with its large size, we find a convulsive history of recent extinction, conditioned by climate change, but executed by humans. Therefore, from my point of view, the mixture of a form of familiar animal, of a colossal size, which populated practically the entire northern hemisphere, with a direct relationship with humans from a very distant past and with a history of recent and certainly morbid disappearance forms a curriculum hardly achievable to opt to be an animal that raises fascinations. "
In La parte blanda de la montaña, Madrid-based Sevillian writer Álex Prada explores the end of mammoths and, to some extent, their reappearance in two temporal moments separated by thousands of years. Its story is told in two planes: in one of them, Prada tells the story of a hunter who, 6,000 years ago, wants to find a mammoth, an increasingly scarce animal, which resembles a moving mountain. This prehistoric story intersects with that of Khünbish, who lives in Mongolia in the twenty-first century and who wants to join the flourishing business of trafficking mammoth tusks in order to get out of poverty. Because the thaw caused by the global climate crisis, which especially affects the places where woolly mammoths lived, is causing the remains of these giants, in some cases perfectly preserved offspring, to emerge from the permafrost – the permanently frozen land of the Arctic, which is thawing at a rapid pace; in others, ivory tusks that reach enormous value in a market where trafficking in elephant fenders is increasingly prosecuted.
"Although it does not reach the popular level of dinosaurs, their extinction is also very iconic and is surrounded by multiple hypotheses," says Prada. "All this is fed from time to time with news that tells us about experiments that could reproduce mammoths from their DNA. In my novel, the emotionality of that disappearance and the outcropping of its remains centuries later are the central axes on which the whole plot is built, loaded with philosophy that makes us think and rethink the endings, their causes, their consequences and the sentimental charge that all that has.
Two men lift the carcass of a baby mammoth preserved in permafrost in the Susumansky region of Russia's Magadan Oblast in 1977. Sovfoto / Universal Images / Getty Images (Universal Images Group via Getty)
Dira, the hunter of the end of prehistory invented by Prada, connects not only with the images that literature has been creating of the relationship between humans and mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years, a link that has been confirmed by numerous archaeological remains. The third part of The Children of the Earth, by Jean Auel, the American writer who has sold 45 million copies of her prehistoric saga, is entitled The Mammoth Hunters (Maeva; translation by Leonor Tejada Conde-Pelayo). He describes, for example, sophisticated tents – which have nothing to do with the caves in which we imagine our ancestors living, who probably used them more for painting than for living – built mostly with mammoth bones and tusks. Many excavations have shown that the remains of these giants were essential for the construction of habitations.
It is impossible to determine what prehistoric art meant, because its meaning has been lost with the passage from one cultural universe to another, it can only be classified and analyzed almost statistically. However, there are numerous indications that mammoths occupied an important place in that spiritual world, not only because of the abundance of representations – beyond the French cave of Rouffignac known as "the grotto of the 100 mammoths", they are not as common as reindeer, horses or bison, although they appear frequently. but because they were used to construct the everyday, but also the sacred.
Just at the beginning of World War II, in August 1939, two researchers found fragments of mammoth ivory in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, in the state of Baden-Württemberg (southern Germany). It was the last day of excavation. Those pieces of ivory managed to survive the conflict and in 1969 the archaeologist Joachim Hahn began to complete the puzzle, which was not finished until 2012, years after his death, because more fragments were appearing. It is one of the great discoveries of European prehistory, comparable to the caves of Altamira, Chauvet or Lascaux, because what those fragments hid was the first imaginary being that is known, a lion man of 40,000 years ago, carved when the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe, then populated by Neanderthals. which would disappear soon after.
Skeleton of a fossilized Siberian mammoth 3.5 meters high and between 40,000 and 50,000 years old, in the exhibition 'Mammoth. The giant of the Ice Age', at the CaixaForum in Madrid. JUAN BARBOSA
Although the original is preserved in the Museum of Ulm, the CaixaForum exhibition offers a beautiful reproduction of this powerful, although very small, figure that extends the imagination and human creativity to the most remote past. And the material chosen was mammoth defenses. "Engravings have been found in caves located in regions where it is known that there were never mammoths," says biologist Javier Hidalgo, responsible for the science exhibitions of the La Caixa Foundation. "That means there was oral transmission, that somehow knowledge about those animals was passed on and it reached places they had never inhabited."
The skeleton that can now be seen in Madrid in the exhibition Mamut. The Ice Age giant is a woolly mammoth fossil found in Russia. It is between 40,000 and 50,000 years old. It is impressive to contemplate a creature of these dimensions, especially its tusks, and it is overwhelming to imagine the great herds of mammoths that roamed the Earth for millions of years. "The mammoth grew throughout its life, like modern elephants," Marylène Patou-Mathis explains by email. "The tusks, in particular, grew continuously, as did the molars. The average weight of an adult was 4 to 6 tons. To sustain himself, he probably had to consume between 180 and 200 kilos of plants a day. If we extrapolate it to the current African elephant, mammoth females and young individuals had to travel in herds of 10 to 40 animals. The males, on the other hand, left from the age of 14 and only returned to the group during the mating season. At this time there were fights between monumental males over 25 years old, and the most powerful, with the most impressive fangs, won the right to mate. The gestation period was about two years. The heat probably took place in July, which gave the males time to regain strength before winter. The calf was born at the end of May, so the female could recover until September. Herds migrated to warmer areas at the beginning of the cold season."
One of the dreams, or nightmares, of contemporary science plays with the idea of resurrecting a mammoth thanks to genetics. But, beyond technology, ethical dilemmas, the very possibility of doing so, it is a plan that presents many problems. "Like most people, I am intrigued by the possibility that today we can genetically create mammoths using CRISPR technology in the genomes of Asian elephants, the closest remaining relatives of this species," says Dan Flores. "Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that modified mammoths would have to exist in some kind of simulation of their original ecosystems. That would include their predators, and I doubt we'd be willing to want to resurrect saber-toothed tigers!" Perhaps its place should remain in our imagination, and as a warning that no form of life is strong enough not to disappear.
'Mammoth. The giant of the Ice Age'. CaixaForum Madrid. Through May 31.
Recommended reading
The soft part of the mountain
Álex Prada
Seix Barral, 2022
352 pages. 19,50 euros
The first megafauna
Antonio Monclova
Almuzara, 2023
416 pages. 23.95 euros
The sixth extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert
Translation by Joan Lluís Riera
Review, 2019
344 pages. 18,90 euros
Histoires de Mammouth
Marylène Patou-Mathis
Fayard, 2015. In French
392 pages. 25 euros
Wild New World
Dan Flores
W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. In English
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The Mammoth Hunters
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Translation by Leonor Tejada Conde-Pelayo
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