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Fossil Legends of the First Americans

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Following her innovative and informative study of fossils as roots for myths in the Mediterranean, Mayor brings her investigative talents to the Western Hemisphere. Here, she follows the pattern set in her earlier book, "Ancient Paleontologists" by examining the myths and legends of Native Americans. Did they, like their Eurasian counterparts in Greece, find ancient bones protruding from creek beds and bluffs? Did they also weave legends of fabulous creatures, human giants or spiritual entites from these unusual artefacts? In this account of tales and myths, Mayor's fluid style enlivens the legends, their tellers and the artefacts that inspired them.

Dividing her quest into regional investigations, she surveys the East Coast of North America, skips South to the realm of the Incas, then returns to Great Plains and Pacific Slope. Mayor finds links from recorded stories to the bones of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammoths. She is hampered, of course, by the minimal direct information available. She must rely on those who recorded and interpreted the information often gathered from conquered peoples. And many of the earliest records were destroyed by the Christian conquerors. What remains of those records has been the subject of much dispute. In early New England, Puritan Cotton Mather rejected stories and fossils alike as the invalid heritage of the heathen "salvages". In modern times, renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson rejected the notion of Native American fossil finds and the legends surrounding them as lacking scientific value.

Mayor, however, shows how narrow Simpson's view has proven. Taking the legends more seriously, she notes that even President Thomas Jefferson had enough faith in fossil finds to charge the Lewis and Clark expedition with searching for living specimens. It took one of the geniuses of the times, Georges Cuvier, to bestow validity on fossil bones by declaring them the remnants of actual ancient creatures. With so many of the artefacts representing large species, the underlying logic of Native American legends depicting giant people and creatures makes sense.

The tales Mayor recounts are those of huge, terrifying animals or human-like creatures. Some raid the human settlements, only defeated by divine beings or the occasional heroic figure. Many of the stories have these beings eliminated by lightning or "fire from the sky". The powers of the giants were immense, but some felt the strength and size might be imparted to people. It remains unclear how many peoples used the bones for medicinal purposes - reminiscent of the "dragon bones" of apothecary shops in China. From Atlantic to Pacific, on the Plains or in the Andes, the bones emerged, launching fireside stories. The tales show how innovative individuals acquired special powers in the community through knowledge of fossils. These people could give the artefacts meaning or make them useful in various ways. There is a great similarity among the many peoples of the Western Hemisphere on what the strange objects appearing from the ground meant. The theme of giants, great battles and contests with fiery ends recurs often. When recorded in images, whether on tipis or stelae, they are readily identifiable.

Fossils in "enterprising" North America became the subject of frauds and deceptions. To the credulous, artefacts take on a special role and there's money to be made in them. Mayor concludes her book with an account of many of these. Fossils have been used to support "Scripture", such as accounting for the Noachean Flood. A regular business arose in Mexico through a trove of clay figurines purporting to represent ancient Sumer or even Atlantis. Red-haired giants were "found" in Nevada and ceremonies are performed in northern Mexico by people claiming to have recent contact with dinosaurs.
Mayor's books on ancient paleontology are a call for further investigation of a new field of interest. She is a herald for a new, emerging science. Simply finding bones and other fossils is no longer sufficient evidence for assessing the past. Long-term historical and legendary records have much to contribute. Mayor's plea for more studies should be taken up by young [and not so young!] scholars who are open-minded enough to apply new ideas and approaches. Her clear prose style eases the way for anybody interested in these topics to delve into them and perceive the possibilities. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Long before Europeans rediscovered the dinosaur, Native Americans knew about fossils. They collected and tried to explain them, and fossils remain part of the living legacy of Native culture today. Always fascinating and often passionate, this book traces the story of Amerindian fossil-collecting from the Aztecs to the Iroquois and from the pre-Columbian era to the politics of the American West. Adrienne Mayor has written a groundbreaking and scholarly book that is also a pleasure to read. The illustrations are beautiful. Mayor does for Native-American culture what she did for the Greeks and Romans in an earlier book about unknown fossil hunters. Her new volume has many strands, from paleontology to history to Hollywood, and they come together seamlessly.

I always wondered how Native Americans interpreted the huge fossil skeletons of extinct animals like giant sloths and mastodons, dinosaurs and Pterodactyls. Natural History Museums in the US never address this question, even though they often display dinosaur skeletons that were dug up on American Indian Reservations.

Mayors book is based on an obvious fact: centuries before Europeans arrived, way before scientists started studying fossils, people in the Americas created stories to try to explain the weird remains of creatures that died out millions of years ago. I was amazed that she found the oldest recorded fossil legends from the Inkas and Aztecs; the book is well-researched and I liked her writing style, as she presents fossil legends told by the Iroquois, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Navaho,Apache, and many other tribes to account for the various kinds of fossils they found.

My favorite were the exciting Lakota Sioux stories about the fossils of giant marine reptiles (Mosasaurs) and huge pterasaurs in the badlands and chalk hills of the west: they attributed the bones to wars between giant water serpents and thunderbirds.

What really impressed me was the way Mayor shows how the Native American ideas about fossils were accurate about a lot of things that scientists would discover later. This is the idea behind geomythology, which has been in the news lately as scientists are beginning to see that the myths about fossils and volcanoes, earthquakes, etc, were based on real evidence and sometimes actually got some things right without modern scientific methods. The Native American tales of fossils talk about earth's first lifeforms in primeval times, changes of species, and extinctions.

In a section at the end of the book, Mayor chronicles some entertaining misinformed accounts and deliberate hoaxes, such as claims that dinos and human beings existed at the same time.

The celebrated late Sioux activist/scholar Vine Deloria, Jr called Mayor's work on Native American oral traditions about fossils and mythical creatures "courageous," "brilliant," and "well-researched." Roger Echo Hawk, leading Pawnee historian, wrote that this ground-breaking book is the first to show why Native American oral tradiitons should be taken seriously in academic scholarship, history, and science. Comanche writer David Yeagley also finds Fossil LEgends of the First Americans a praiseworthy book. The numerous Native American elders, storytellers, historians, and others from tribes all around the United states and Canada who helped Mayor recover fossil-related narratives from becoming forgotten obviously trusted her and imparted their traditional understandings of the notions of monsters of the sky, water, and earth. Their respect was mutual, good testament to the depth and sensitivity of Mayor's contribution.

I bought this book because I enjoyed Mayor's previous book and I have become interested in American prehistory. This book is more readable than the First Fossil Hunters (which I also enjoyed and learned from), and makes me aware how very large this continent is and how little I know about it. The author's sympathy with the pre-literate peoples does not diminish her appreciation of modern science. It's an enjoyable read and makes me want to visit regions more fossiliferous than New England.
If you happen to be reading it at the same time as When They Separated Earth From Sky (Barber and Barber) it's like being in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation between friends and colleagues.

This work exceeds expectation created by Mayor's previous excavation, "The First Fossil Hunters", which digs out the solid remains of myths of the Classical ancient world. The research may not qualify as 'exhaustive'; but, it is certainly extensive, with shovels-full of previously unpublished Native American lore. The Appendix and Notes sections take about a fourth of the volume, but are as fascinating as the text itself. It is a companion milestone to her first project demonstrating that, contrary to the overconfident opinion of academic science, Human ancestors did not simply create their traditional histories out of their imaginations for entertainment purposes, as we tend to do nowadays; but, were usually quite genuine in observing, understanding, and explaining these undeniable pieces of the past in their own way, as is the tendancy of every culture. The reader will be further enlightened to find that the various folktales of the Native Americans contain common elements which preserve a knowlege of the remote past that exceeded the academic science of the time. You may even be inclined to think, after considering the 'former myths' of Troy, Ankor Wat, Irem, Ebla, and others, that the only true myth is "myth" itself: a pigeonhole term that was invented to safely and securely catagorize anything that does not immediately seem believable.

This is really wonderful book! I recommend it to everybody interested in fossils although the book is more about people than about old bones. Tons of fascinating facts and legends. The book is also quite serious study of native american folklore as well.

Indians in North America were the first to have the thrill of discovering bizarre and enormous dinosaur fossils, long before white europeans and the founding fathers got interested in paleontology.
This book is filled with fascinating stories of all the tribes in Alaska and Canada, the United state and Mexico and south America, who came across mysterious bones, teeth, claws and footprints of huge extinct creatures, unlike the animals and birds and fish they knew.
These stories will amaze anyone who thinks science only began in Europe in the 18th Century! Many of the speculations of the American Indians come close to anticipating modern science theory.
Highly recommended.

This is an interesting book and quotes important stoties and localsources. Unfortunatly, it is deeply flawed by Mayor's lack of background in understanding First Nation's discourse about"monsters;" beings that are connected to land, story and people.

Adrienne Mayor tries to solve evolutionists' dilemma of many ancient legends and images from around the world describing and depicting living dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mammoths and other extinct creatures by suggesting that the ancients and the American Indians were experts in paleontology. She claims they engaged in extensive excavations and reconstructing the extinct animals. Based on this sophisticated knowledge they created primitive and false accounts and depictions of live animals, with some details than were known until recently even to our paleontologists, who are armed with computers, microscopes and hundreds years of experience.

Oddly, Mayor writes about convictions widely hold by American Indians, that bones should be avoided and excavating them is bed medicine. She mentions Indians opposing the paleontologists for removing bones from the ground, which they consider disrespectful to the past (see p. 131, 134, 249, 289). However, in face of their legends and accurate descriptions about the extinct animals, she makes these people who traditionally abhor bones and have been at odds with paleontology, skilled at digging up bones and reconstructing lost animals.

Mayor herself contradicts this flawed thesis on more than one occasion. For example, she provides information that Indians (as well as Chinese or Nordic people) possessed knowledge about soft body parts such as mammoth's trunk or about scales on dinosaurs, which cannot be deduced from bones alone. For this reason our scientists until recently assumed wrongly that skin of the dinosaurs was more like that of elephants. How come Indians knew better? They have known about scales, habits and diet of the dinosaurs. How did they know about crest and featherless, bat like wings of the pterosaurs? There is no way to deduce it from bones alone. How did they know about the color and look of the mammoths? How did they come to knowledge about habits of extinct burrowing beavers?

Mayor's thesis may look pleasing for a casual eye but it is deeply flawed. When one looks close at the details Indians or Chinese or Nordic people knew about the look, habits, diet of pterosaurs and dinosaurs, which she admits, her thesis falls apart.

The book is well researched for which Mayor should be commended. However, it begs a question why such well educated and intelligent lady makes such rediculous conlusions going against much of her own research? Was she paid for it or just blinded by philosophical assumptions. Princeton University Press publishing thesis illogical and contradictory to the data presented in the book makes a statement on how uneasy evolutionists feel about the growing evidence for human coexistance with dinosaurs. Their camp must be desperate to support another silly solution to the dilemma, after Carl Sagan's idea about dinosaures preserved for 65 billion years in reincarnated memory by dreams.

If you are looking for a more logical approach to this dilemma I recommand reading "Dragons or Dinosaurs" by Darek Isaacs.