[Note #7] To Tame the Forces of Nature: The Mammoth AND the Glyptodont

From any point in the Brooks Museum in 1878 you could not miss the ‘main event’ on the first floor. There stood the mammoth - but it was not alone. It was accompanied by a glyptodont, a giant armadillo relative from South America. Were these colossal animals there for the spectacle? Or was a lesson embedded in their placement? Or, likely, both.

Darwin’s radical idea of natural selection described an ever-changing and competitive natural world. Darwin’s colleague, Thomas Huxley, asked the question that Darwin eluded: what is the place of humans in this conception of nature?[1] The paired mammoth and glyptodont were a pertinent case study. They were among the few massive Ice Age animals that were contemporaries of people in the Americas. Humans hunted them. The human populations survived, these animals did not. The exhibit prompted an anthropocentric lesson ‘naturalizing’ human dominance. It now appears that warming climate was a far more significant factor in mammoth/glyptodont extinction than the occasional spear of a hunter. Yet, 19th-century ideas persist. Western societies continue to think they can and should try to tame nature, to no avail, and far worse.[2]

From Professor Hantman

[1] Thomas Huxley, 1863, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, New York: Dover Press (originally published by D. Appleton and Co., New York). [2] On recent wildfires in California, see Mark Arax, “Forever Trying to Tame the Forces of Nature,” Sunday Review, page 9, New York Times, September 20, 2020.