โ€œFossil Legendโ€: fossils and early North American geomythology

Fossils have inspired a great deal of myths throughout history, especially among the native peoples of North America. Today these narratives are the object of study of geomythology, a science that takes a new look at the conception of the cosmos of ancient peoples.

di Francesco Cerofolini

Since ancient times, fossils have exerted an irresistible fascination on the minds of men. Whether they were gigantic petrified bones or ancient shells found on the tops of mountains, for centuries these freaks of nature have accessed the imagination of our ancestors who, trying to make sense of their existence with the limited knowledge they had, gave birth to a multitude of myths about it. For the ancient Greeks, the large mammalian bones dating back to the Tertiary era that have been found throughout the Mediterranean were evidence of the Gigantomachy.ย 

Greek travelers who came as far as the Siwalik range near the Himalayas told of bizarre dragon skulls exhibited in local temples, in the same region where rich deposits of giraff fossils will be found in the XNUMXth century. In ancient China, the "dragon bones", fossil dinosaur bones sought after for their healing powers.

All these stories are now categorized as fossil legends and are one of the objects of study of geomythology, that branch of folklore studies which deals with the mythical and legendary memory of geological events and their interpretation by pre-scientific cultures. The precise definition of fossil legends it is given to us by the folkloristย Adrienne Mayor, one of the major scholars of the subject:

"I define one fossil legend a story or belief relating extraordinary creatures of myth and legend to observations of mineralized remains of extinct animals, or attempts to explain traces of prehistoric species, including fossil marine animals or plants, and the bones, teeth, claws , the burrows, nests, eggs and footprints of extinct animals.โ€

La Mayor has spent many years studying this field and in 2000 published the groundbreaking essay The First Fossil Hunters, in which he analyzes the beliefs related to fossils in vogue in the classical world. The thesis of the book is that far from being dismissed as curiosities, fossils would have influenced the vision of the world and the history of the Greeks and Romans and numerous examples are given in the volume in support of this thesis.

In 2004 Mayor published Fossil Legends of the First Americans, a full-bodied essay devoted to Native American fossil folklore. The topic is worthy of attention for at least two matovi. The first is that much of the excavations of the early days of American paleontology, such as the notorious "bone wars" among paleontologists Edward D. Cope e Othniel C. Marsh they took place in the territories of the natives and paleontologists often had to rely on the guides of the various tribes to find the fossil deposits. The second reason is that the native fokloric traditions related to fossils they have been mistreated for decades, not properly studied or preserved. Both due to the violence of colonization and due to the evanescence of oral cultures, only fragments of this very large mythical corpus have come down to us. Even paleontology has not shown much attention to this, often downplaying the value of observations made by the natives, as it did George gaylord simpson, one of the fathers of American paleontology with these words:

"Men who spend their lives outdoors have a great deal of objective knowledge, but their understanding of any interpretation of these facts is usually ludicrously poor.

Simpson's words could perhaps have been dictated by an ill-concealed Eurocentrism but they were also dictated by the desire to clearly separate paleontology, at the time still a young science, from any mythical or legendary contamination. About this topic, Mayor's essay is a unicum, which probably saved many myths and traditions from disappearing forever. In this article we will review various fossil legends belonging to different native populations of North America.


Zuni creation myths

The Zuni tribe has inhabited the Zuni Pueblo village in New Mexico for millennia, and their mythology has been greatly influenced by their terrain dotted with canyons and volcanic mountains. In 1891 the ethnologist Frank Cushing collected their creation myths. Similarly to other New World peoples such as the Aztecs, the Zuni believed that our world was only the latest in a series of worlds populated by the most varied beings that had been destroyed from time to time. Legend has it that the young land was submerged by water and shaken by earthquakes, as well as being dominated by gigantic monsters. There was also a breed of proto-humans with moist skin, webbed feet and tails, who lived in the darkness of their mud island, often falling prey to monsters.

I Sun Gemini decided that the world must be drained and solidified before the monsters devoured all men, so brandishing a shield and a magical bow the two Geminis triggered a cosmic conflagration. Fire engulfed the earth, drying the soil and hardening it with its heat. Humans emerged from the darkness and began life on the surface. Unfortunately the monsters had multiplied and threatened the newborn humanity, so the Twins began to electrocute monsters one by one with lightning, turning them to stone. As one of the sources told Cushing about him among the nativesโ€it happens that we find here and there, around the world, their forms, sometimes as big as the beasts themselves, sometimes withered and distorted. And we often see among the rocks the forms of many beings who no longer live. [โ€ฆ] This shows us that everything was different in the days when the earth was youngโ€. At the time Cushing could not connect the tales of petrified primordial beings to the dinosaur fossils of which the Zuni territory is rich since the first discoveries took place only in the thirties.

The paleontologist Douglas Wolfe, questioned by Mayor, however, has no doubts about the connection between fossils and Zuni creation myths: "I can't believe some of these dinosaur bones weren't identified as "petrified beasts" by the Zuni." The paleontologist also points out that the myth reveals a sophisticated idea of โ€‹โ€‹time, environmental changes and evolution, being one of the few myths to imagine that humans evolved from simpler forms: "It's all here in one elegant myth: evolution, extinction, climate change, deep time, geology and fossils.". Over the decades, the remains of theropod dinosaurs, hadrosaurs and a new species of ceratopsid dinosaur that was named Zuniceratops, as well as fossilized trees and plants. Ninety million years ago the Zuni territory consisted of the coasts of the inland sea that crossed North America where prehistoric crocodiles, giant sharks and the mighty marine reptiles known as mosasaurs dwelt, an environment, Wolfe points out, not unlike that imagined in the myths Zuni.

By virtue of these myths, the Zuni used to collect fossils as a fetish. According to legend, the petrified monsters had been transformed by the will of the Twins into We-but-we, fetishes that had been given the mission of helping men instead of harming them. Nowadays the Zuni use small carved figurines but in the past the most coveted fetishes were fossils, in which the spirit of the petrified monster was thought to be hidden dormant. An example are the fossils of belemnite, a mollusk whose shell resembles a bullet, abundant in the geological layers of the Jurassic and Cretaceous. The Zunis believed they were the teeth of primeval monsters, they called them Shom-i-ta-k'ia and they were entrusted to warriors to protect themselves from arrows in battle.


Fossils and the Navajo conception of time

Like the Zunis, the Navajos also interpret fossils as petrified remains of primordial monsters, but while the former see potentially beneficial objects in them, the latter try in every possible way to stay away from them. In the memoirs of paleontologists, many episodes are found when their helpers Navajo have expressed great fear when not outright terror towards the fossil bones. An account dating back to the XNUMXs tells how huge bones were found during the construction of a dam and how the Navajo workers refused to dig further, muttering the word "Chindeeโ€ i.e. ghost. In the same period the geologist Baylor Brooks discovered that the Navajos identified the remains of dinosaurs and marine fossils as the bones of Yeitso, a mythological monster and how it was widely believed that its ghost still haunted the fossil deposits.

Navajo mythology, like the Zuni one, tells of a series of worlds that followed one another, cyclically destroyed by catastrophes. Humans fled those imperiled worlds and took refuge in later ones. These worlds were dominated by monsters that were destroyed by twin divine sons of the goddess Asdzaa Nรกdleehรฉ. The monsters were imprisoned in the ground, and their mineralized remains are there as a testament to this. The spirits of these creatures continue to exist therefore they must be appeased with special rituals and their remains must not be disturbed. It is precisely the idea that these creatures can transcend the limits of space and time that is the basis of the fear that the Navajos have towards fossils.

Even today the Navajo are reluctant to talk about these topics with foreigners, however Adrienne Mayor was able to interview the spiritual leader Dineh Harry Manygoats. In her book, Mayor summarizes the conversation with Manygoats which illustrates the fascinating native conception of space and time, their ideas on the cosmology, the past, the present and the future of our world:

โ€œOur present era is the fourth, the white โ€“ or 'shiny' world. It was preceded by the third world, the yellow world; from the second, the blue world; and from the first, the black (or red) world. Those who "interpret the stories esoterically and look for the signs" have noticed over the past century increasing indications of a "global corruption of the environment", which signal that the global catastrophe is already leading us into the fifth world. Everything from the universe to the neutrino is "alive - nothing is inorganic or lifeless." Each era was characterized by life forms specific to that particular "space/time" (Manygoats explained that the Dineh conceptualize space and time "as one"). In the first world, for example, life was microscopic, formless except for "energies." Monsters, dinosaurs, and other giant beings existed in the yellow (third) world along with the little ants. [โ€ฆ] Ants, unchanged from that era still live in our world and travel between the layers of the earth and space/time.โ€

Manygoats explained to Mayor that it is not good for the natives to interfere with the remains of animals that died long ago. Past lives and deeds never quite disappear, as time itself is alive and ever-changing.ย 

"Things of the past retain a sort of pseudo-life, an afterimage, ghostly shape or echo that never changes. It's almost as if time is an energy that flows through things. For example, Manygoats commented, remnants of our conversation will persist in some form in this room into the future. And since nothing in the world is inanimate and everything is interconnected, disturbing something that was physically buried in the distant past and bringing it into the present unravels the dense web of time โ€” in fact, destroys the barriers of time โ€” and will have undesirable consequences.

The same reasoning can also be extended to fossil fuels extracted from the subsoil, and in this Navajo mythology rings ominously prophetic.ย "Just as men dig up long-buried coal, pulling what were once living plants out of their former context, polluting the atmosphere, this violates the natural balance as paleontologists remove bones from the ground. .ย Manygoats warns paleontologists: โ€œI can't tell them what to do, they have to accept responsibility for this danger."

Removing fossils from their matrix goes against the Navajo worldview, as for them these creatures are in a sort of suspended animation. As Manygoats explains:

"Some monsters from the past can manifest as "negative life" [...] it's really a bad idea to bring this negative nature back to life - as history could repeat itself."


The Legend of the Great Elk and the Great Eagle

A legend that is directly related to the observation of fossils is the one collected in 1898 by Laforia, a Jicarilla Apache storyteller. The story goes that at the dawn of time monstrous animals and birds of enormous dimensions massacred human beings. A fearless young man named Jonayaiyn decided to rid himself of these monsters once and for all. He surprised the Great Moose south of the Jicarilla territory and killed it. After slaying the monster he took its horns with the intention of using them as a weapon. Going west he came to an inaccessible rock where the Great Eagle dwelt. Suddenly the bird grabbed him with his claws and threw him into his nest. When the Great Eagle later reappeared, the youth struck it with its horns and killed it. The storyteller also said that as proof of the story the wing of the monstrous bird was still preserved in Taos in New Mexico.ย 

What could be the relic the storyteller was talking about? It has been hypothesized that the figure of the Great Eagle was inspired by the discovery of fossils of pterosaur, a flying reptile coeval with the dinosaurs. But these types of fossils have never been reported in Apache Territory. It is more likely that these tales derive from ancestral memories of large birds of prey that coexisted with humans during the Pleistocene such as large condors or Teratornis.ย 

The monster wing exhibited in Taos may be part of a mummified body of Teratornis. This is not a rare occurrence in that area, where mummified birds from 12,500 years ago have been found in the caves, together with bones of other prehistoric animals. Exceptionally preserved specimens of Teratornis merrianiย they have been discovered in Dry Cave, Eddy County New Mexico and others have been found in California, Nevada, Oregon and Florida. It is plausible that these findings have if not inspired at least served as evidence of the legend of the Great Eagle.


The Drowned Giants of the Pawnee

George Bird Grinnell was a famous ethnologist who lived at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, known for his studies of the culture of the Pawnee, a population among which he lived for a long time. Before embarking on these studies Grinnell cut his teeth as a paleontologist, looking for fossils in Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, a long apprenticeship that led him to become the assistant of the famous paleontologist Othniel Marsh and to work with him at the Peabody Museum. In 1874 Marsh sent Grinnell following the military expedition led by the General George Custer in the Black Hills. Here, aided by native guides, Grinnell discovered a large dinosaur bone and two giant tortoises. What Grinnell excavated was an area rich in fossils, known as the Formation Hell Creek, which in the following century would have been the site of sensational discoveries such as that of the skeleton of T.Rex nicknamed Sue, found in 1990. In 1876 Grinnell declined an offer to follow General Custer's Seventh Cavalry against the Sioux. A forward-looking decision as that expedition had a bloody end in the defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

After receiving his doctorate in paleontology Grinnell returned to the West where he was adopted by the Pawnee, acquiring the name of White Wolf, and devoted himself to transcribing their myths and legends. The Pawne elders told Grinnell how the earth was once inhabited by giants. "The first men who lived on this earth were very large Indians." These giants were โ€œVery big and very strong and they used to hunt bison on foot. They were so fast and strong that a man could run over a buffalo and kill it with a large stone, or a club, or even with his flint knife." But these giants did not believe in Tirawa, the creator. Thinking that nothing could stop them, the giants became more and more arrogant. Tirawa, enraged by this lack of faith, raised the waters and swept the giants with mud. โ€œThis great people sank into the mud and were drowned. The big bones found on the prairie are the bones of these people". The elders had seen the bones deep in the canyons and were convinced that the giants had sunk into the mud. "After the destruction of the race of giants, Tirawa created a new race of men, small, like today's."

Similar stories are common to many populations of North America but, as Mayor points out, the idea of โ€‹โ€‹giants drowned in mud is peculiar to the Pawnee. This image may have been inspired by the remains of Pleistocene animals found by the hundreds at hot springs like South Dakota's Hot Springs Mammoth Site. Here paleontologists have discovered marks in the ground produced by prehistoric animals in an attempt to free themselves from the mud that was engulfing them.

Although Pawnee elders spoke clearly of giant bones found on the prairies, Grinnell never connected this myth to the dinosaur bones that he himself had studied for years. How was this possible? For the historic Pawnee Roger Echo Hawk, who studied Grinnell's papers, the ethnologist regarded this mythic material as mere imaginary tales created by an intellectually inferior culture. Explains Echo-Hawk, Grinnell"did not give much credence to oral literature as a memory capable of preserving sophisticated knowledge about ancient history and natureโ€, a position that led him to reject a priori any relationship between the stories of the Pawnee and paleontological finds. Paradoxically, the stories collected by Grinnell are yet another demonstration of the deep knowledge of fossils by these populations and how their observation has been incorporated into their myths and folklore.


The Cheyenne Monsters

The primordial struggle between two races of monsters, the aquatic monsters (water monsters) and the thunderbirds (Thunderbirds), is a recurring motif in Native American mythology. The aforementioned ethnologist Grinnell collected many such stories during his time living with the Cheyennes of Nebraska and Kansas during the XNUMXs. The idea of โ€‹โ€‹this primitive warfare was inspired by the natives of the Great Plains by the large amount of fossils that can be found in these regions, such as those of the great flying reptile Pteranodon and the remains of marine reptiles such as mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and elasmosaurs.

Cheyenne mythology, as Grinnell tells us, is full of many types of monstrous beings. Legends tell us of different types of aquatic monsters that inhabited lakes, rivers and thermal springs, incidentally precisely the places where shells and fossil teeth are most easily found but also the remains of marine reptiles from the Cretaceous period. โ€œThe Aquatic Monstersโ€, reports Grinnell, โ€œthey were of various kinds, and whether they were harmful or not, they were alarming.โ€ They were believed to overturn canoes and swallow men. The belief is so deeply rooted that even today the more traditional Cheyenne are careful not to spend the night near rivers or lakes for fear of these monsters.

One type of aquatic monster was the mihn, described as a large lizard, which cannot but refer us back to the fossils of large prehistoric reptiles. Other legends had it equipped with one or two large horns, a characteristic perhaps derived from the observation of the tusks of the mammoth. To underline the primordial nature of this creature, Grinnell says that no Cheyenne has ever reported having seen it alive.

Another type of monster was known by the name of ahke. He was said to live both in water and on land, and the Cheyenne represented him as a quadrupedal beast similar to a gigantic buffalo. Here Grinnell makes one of the very few concessions to the natives' knowledge of fossils. Indeed he informs us that the word ahk means โ€œof stoneโ€ or โ€œpetrifiedโ€. Connecting this myth to fossils Grinnell tells how โ€œlarge fossil bones found along streams or in the prairie are said to belong to ahk.โ€ย The bones that inspired this legend could be those of large mastodons or prehistoric rhinoceroses such as the Titanotheriums widespread in western Nebraska and South Dakota or even the fossil remains of dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops often found in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota, eastern Montana and the Lance Creek Formation in Wyoming.

Another confirmation of how the Cheyenne knew that their land was inhabited by gigantic creatures in the remote past comes from the memoirs of John Stands in Timber, a Cheyenne born in 1884. As a child John listened to stories about creation and the early Cheyenne told by two elderly women, White necklace e Yellow Haired Woman. The elders told young John that the early Cheyennes hunted giant animals and that they had to escape large, ferocious predators. Other elders pointed to the tall branches of the poplars to give the youngsters an idea of โ€‹โ€‹the size of creatures from the distant past.

I medicine men Cheyenne collected the large petrified bones to grind them into powder and once combined with particular pigments, used them to create war paints which were believed to have protective powers. Grinnell tells how a Cheyenne sorcerer known as White Bull used stones of different colors, black and yellow earth, coal and โ€œpetrified bones of large animals reduced to powderโ€ mixed with clay to create a special paint that would protect the famous warrior Roman Nose from lightning and enemy weapons.

After all, the natives of the West will surely have come across fossil bones while looking for pigments for their ritual uses. For example, in the Chinle Formation and in the Painted Desert of Arizona the red ocher deposits are rich marine and dinosaur fossils dating back to the Triassic. White Bull also collected small fossils such as Baculites, fossils of small cephalopods dating back to the Createaceous. The Cheyenne used these fossils, which they believed had special powers, to reveal the position of the enemy or cause rain to make their tracks disappear in a hostile territory.

White Bull possessed an amulet consisting of a baculite wrapped in beads and ermine tails. When he gave up the warrior life, Grinnell says, he turned to his fossil amulet of him"telling him that now he had stopped fighting and killing people, and from now on the stone should live as best he could and that he would never go to war again. He then he put her away inside her houseโ€.


The great war between Water monsters e Thunderbirds

Even the tribes of the High Plains had their own versions of the primal clash between Water Monsters and Thunderbirds. According to the Sioux creation myth the world before humans was inhabited by insects and reptiles under the rule of Unkethi, the water monster. There were reptiles of all kinds, from armored to limbless, but these creatures grew to disproportionate sizes and began to devour all living things. In the first of the four ages - the era of the Rock - the Water Monsters were petrified by lightning from the Thunderbirds rushed to restore the balance of nature and their remains were buried in the ground.ย 

The legends about these mythical beings seem to have always been closely linked to the discovery of fossils. The earliest reference to the legends about Unkethi is found in the memoirs of a French Franciscan, Father Hennepin which was captured by the Dakota Sioux in 1680. Hennepin was able to see the Dakotas making offerings at St. Anthony Falls, a waterfall located on the Mississippi River at the โ€œgreat deity calledย Oanktayhee", one of the many names of Unkthei, who was said to live inside the waterfall and manifest as a gigantic bison. In 1874, two hundred years after Father Hennepin's account, mammoth bones and tusks were found in those same waterfalls.

In 1834, to the two missionary brothers Samuel e Gideon Pond, who were intent on writing down the beliefs of the Dakota in Minnesota, were shown large bones said to be fromย Unkteri. The two Ponds identified them as mammoth bones, vastly larger than any animal the Sioux had ever encountered alive. Since the beast had never been seen on land Samuel Pond wrote that since their bones were often found in wet places, the Dakota had concluded that Unkteri must have lived in water.

In Minnesota mastodon bones were highly coveted for their magical properties. Pond compares the importance given to that given to the relics of Catholic saints. An irresistible โ€œwakan fluโ€ it was thought to emanate from Unktehi's bones. The concept of wakan it is similar to the concept that other tribes have of manitou: indicates everything that is mysterious and incomprehensible and therefore very powerful.

in 1859 Edward Neill of the Minnesota Historical Society described a Sioux initiation ceremony in which a priest chewed on a piece of bone from "Oanktayhee, patron saint of medicine menโ€. Near Fort Snelling on the Minnesota River, natives told of a mound that held Unktehi bones, while a Dakota man told Samuel Pond how he discovered Unktehi bones in a lake near Shakopee and how he attempted to load them on his unsuccessful canoe.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, geologist and Indian agent who had married an Ojibwe woman wrote in the early nineteenth century that โ€œthe fossil bones of Mastodon, which are often found by the Dakotas, are believed with certainty to be the bones of Onktery." These bones"they are universally esteemed for their quality of wakan, they are used with prodigious effects as curative medicinesโ€. Schoolcraft in his texts on the natives writes that the natives imagined Unktehi as a kind of gigantic ox whose horns extended to the sky and whose body movements could produce floods.

As can be seen from these testimonies, the Sioux visualized Unktehi as a large aquatic mammal modeled on mammoths dating back to the Pleistocene. But when the Sioux pushed west up the Missouri River into theย badlands they came across the fossils of dinosaurs and large marine reptiles and so their idea of โ€‹โ€‹the Water Monsters began to change. In the west the figure of Unktehi still possessed large horns but now he was represented as a gigantic reptile or serpent with legs. Beginning in the XNUMXs Unktehi was described by the Lakota medicine men โ€œmade like a giant scaly snake with feetโ€, an image that can only refer to the sinuous and serpentine mosasaur skeletons found in the Badlands. The identification of the Water Monsters with the dinosaurs became total in the XNUMXth century. For example the historic Lakota James LaPointe writing down the legends of his people in 1976 identifies "the Unkche Ghila, the great animal that no man has ever seen aliveโ€ like a dinosaur.

As for Unktehi's enemies, i Thunderbirds, whose name for the Lakota is Wakinyan, the natives distinguished four types. All Thunderbirds were enormous in size but one was black with a very long toothed beak and huge claws. The second type was yellow with only six feathers on each wing. The third was scarlet with large wings and the fourth was blue or white and amorphous in shape. Everyone had arrows as a weapon capable of "destroy life and shatter oak trees into atoms.โ€ The Sioux believed that the collapsed bluffs along the Missouri River were where the Thunderbirds attacked the Water Monsters, while the waters of Buffalo Lake were said to have turned bitter from a Water Monster having been killed there.

Even the Thunderbids happened to find remains. A Sioux told the aforementioned Gideon Pond that he found the body of a Thunderbird along the Blue Earth River in southern Minnesota, with a wingspan of โ€œ25-30 feetโ€. In 1859 Edward Neill reported that some Sioux had unearthed the skeleton of another Thunderbird. Reports like this indicate that the fossil record may have helped crystallize the Thunderbird in the native imagination. According to Adrienne Mayor:

"Many of the beliefs about the four types of Thunderbirds were symbolic, and some of the stories may have combined memories of large, extinct Ice Age birds of prey with fanciful narratives. But discoveries of large skeletons identified as Thunderbirds as late as the XNUMXs suggest that true fossils of winged or beaked creatures played a part in this mythology."

In Minnesota there are no fossils of winged reptiles from the Mesozoic but we must take into consideration the possibility that the Sioux who had traveled as far as Dakota and Nebraska had the opportunity to see fossils of pteranodons or the prehistoric bird hesperonis.

This and the other myths we have reviewed demonstrate not only that fossils were well known to the native populations of the American continent, but that, albeit within a pre-scientific culture, their existence influenced notions of the creation of the world, about past eras and the various forms of life that had followed one another over time. Who knows if the large amount of material collected by Adrienne Mayor would have changed paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson's mind about the paleontological knowledge of the natives. What is certain is that these legends invite us to look less condescendingly and more respectfully at worldviews other than the contemporary one and to appreciate their charm and poetry.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The First Fossil Huntersย by Adrienne Mayor

Fossil Legends of the First Americans by Adrienne Mayor

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