Have you been following the last month’s buzz of a South Korean geneticist trying to clone a mammoth? Ironically, the scientist in question, Hwang Woo-Suk, is notoriously known for previous false claims to have cloned human stem cells. Yet he has recently travel to Siberia to drill cells from the bones of a 28,000 year-old frozen wooly mammoth and the world’s best biologists are convinced that an attempt to clone the extinct elephant-like mammal might be successful.
The wooly mammoth, nicknamed “Buttercup,” was discovered on an island in Siberia in 2013 and as the autopsy provided samples of blood and flesh, the realm of bringing back a species that has been extinct for several thousand years seems plausible. How did we ended up with a word to name a species which is extinct for that long?
The word mammoth refers to any large extinct elephant of the Pleistocene genus Mammuthus, having a hairy coat and long curved tusks and is Russian in origin. Comes from the Russian mamant in mamantova kost (earth-horn).
So it is not a surprise that the English-speakers first encountered the word as a result of the discovery of mammoth maimanto bones and tusks in Siberia. With the first written reference coming from a Russian English dictionary from 1618: “Maimanto, as they say a sea elephant, which is never seen, but according to the Samγites he works himself under ground and so they find his teeth or horns or bones in Pechore and Nova Zemla [Russian territories].”
The first recorded written reference to the Anglicised spelling of the word, comes from 1706, Evert Ysbrants Ides travel book Three years travels from Moscow over-land to China : “The old Siberian Russians affirm that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant.” And only 30 years later readers can encounter the modern spelling of the word, as we use it today, along with a suggestion for its origin, in a Historical-Geographical book:”The Russian Mammoth, certainly came from the Word Behemot [hippopotamus].”
The first written quotation to refer to mammoths outside of Russia, comes from only 1803 when in his diary, a visitor to the Royal Academy in London described his experience of seeing a mammoth skeleton exhibition.
Mammoth also comes to be applied metaphorically to anything of huge size. And it is Thomas Jefferson, who had a keen interest in palaeontology, that is partially responsible for the term describing something of surprisingly large size. With the first two recorded uses of the word mammoth in this meaning, coming from a 1801 and 1802 description of the amounts of food Jefferson received as gifts: “I received..a present of a quarter of a Mammoth-veal” (1801), and “a large wheel of cheese” (the “Cheshire Mammoth Cheese”, a gift from the town of Cheshire to the president in 1802).
On a second thought, maybe the world would be happier if scientist delve into cloning Cheshire cheese rather than mammoths?
