Woolly mammoth tusk Pleistocene-Holocene Siberia,... Lot 8

Woolly mammoth tusk Pleistocene-Holocene Siberia, Russia H. 28 ¾ in - L. 51 ¼ in These tusks belong to one of the great icons of prehistory: the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant, characterized by a coat of 3 different layers of hair, a large adipose hump on the shoulders, a sloping back, very small ears and tail to minimize heat loss, a small trunk, and two long curved tusks that grew in spirals in opposite directions and continued to curve until the tips pointed toward each other, sometimes crossing. Male tusks were longer and twisted: the largest known male tusk is more than 4 meters long and weighs 91 kg. They were usually asymmetrical and showed considerable variation, and until adulthood could grow as much as 15 cm each year, then slow down as the mammoth aged. The enormous size and distinctive shape of the tusks have sparked much debate: it is likely that they were used in intraspecific fighting or to attract females and intimidate rivals. Because of their curvature, the tusks were not suitable for stabbing, but they may have been used for striking, as indicated by lesions on some fossil scapulae. Ivory from the tusks of the woolly mammoth, referred to as "white gold," would have been exported to Russia and Europe as early as the 10th century. Güyük, the 13th-century Khan of the Mongols, is believed to have sat on a throne made entirely of mammoth ivory. The first Siberian ivory to reach Western Europe was brought to London in 1611. German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who traveled in Russia, Siberia, and China from 1771 to 1776, proposed two explanations for the term "mammoth": the term could be derived either from mama, meaning earth in Tatar, or from ma, earth, and mu, mole, in Estonian. This second hypothesis is supported by the legend, which arose among Siberian peoples, of a giant animal that lived underground and sometimes emerged to the surface along the edges of rivers and was mortally wounded by the glare of the sun. Legendary hypotheses about the identity of mammoths are diverse. The Inupiat of the Bering Strait believed the bones came from burrowing creatures; other peoples thought they belonged to prehistoric giants, to elephants that died during a vast military campaign led by Genghis Khan, or even to elephants that escaped from the army of Hannibal and Pyrrhus of Epirus as the army crossed the Swiss Alps. Between 1600 and 1700 Kangxi, one of China's greatest emperors, wrote a book about animals in which he supported the Siberian belief that the remains belonged to five-ton rodents living below the surface of the earth. The medical naturalist Hans Sloane in 1728 recognized that fossilized teeth and tusks from Siberia were elephant, but he supported the biblical thesis that motivated the presence of elephants in the Arctic by a sudden burial during the Great Flood. In 1796, French biologist Georges Cuvier was the first to identify the woolly mammoth remains not as modern elephants transported to the Arctic, but as an entirely new species.