The first fossil hunters: palaeontology in Greek and Roman times.

The first fossil hunters: palaeontology in Greek and Roman times. ADRIENNE MAYOR Adrienne Mayor is an independent classical folklorist and historian of science who studies the historical and scientific realities and natural knowledge embedded in ancient myths, legends, and popular beliefs about natural history. . The first fossil hunters: palaeontology in Greekand Roman times. xx+359 pages, 84 figures. 2000. Princeton (NJ):Princeton University Princeton University,at Princeton, N.J.; coeducational; chartered 1746, opened 1747, rechartered 1748, called the College of New Jersey until 1896.Schools and Research Facilities Press; 0-691-05863-6 hardback 22 [pounds sterling]& $35. It is difficult to imagine another subject for a book that wouldunite the interests of such a range of ANTIQUITY readers as this: frompalaeontologists to Classical art historians, by way of geoarchaeologyand cultural history. The author fully succeeds in establishing her mainthesis, that frequent discoveries and interpretations, howeverdistorted, of fossilized remains took place in Classical times, allaround the Mediterranean littoral littoral/lit��to��ral/ (lit��ah-r'l) pertaining to the shore of a large body of water. littoralpertaining to the shore. and also further east. Althoughseveral Greek thinkers also had a primitive understanding of suchprocesses as fossilisation Noun 1. fossilisation - the process of fossilizing a plant or animal that existed in some earlier age; the process of being turned to stonefossilization , extinction and geological time, the study ofbones was essentially a popular pastime, from which the naturalphilosophers stood aloof (chapter 5). Mayor's prize piece of evidence adorns the dust-cover of thebook: a vase-painting of about 550 BC with a scene of Herakles andHesione fighting the Monster of Troy, depicted in the form of a hugeanimal skull bearing a remarkable resemblance to those of giant Mioceneskulls since discovered not too far from Troy. Nothing else quite likethis creature is known from Greek art, and Mayor's interpretationof it is entirely convincing (compare her figures 4.2 and 4.3). Theconclusion, that by the 6th century BC the Greeks must have found andstudied fossil bones, is then supported by an excellent survey of thestrictly archaeological evidence for the preservation of such bones inhistorical and sometimes ceremonial contexts (chapter 4). In her threepreceding chapters, Mayor has conducted a more speculative trawl trawl - To sift through large volumes of data (e.g. Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest. of theextensive literary evidence. Here, the most striking case relates to thelegendary griffin and its resemblances to, in particular, the actualform of the Cretaceous Protoceratops protoceratopsAny member of a genus of quadrupedal dinosaurs found as fossils in Gobi deposits of the Cretaceous period (144–65 million years ago). The hind limbs were more strongly developed than the forelimbs; the back was arched. . The arguments are strengthened,here and elsewhere, by appeal to the geographical coincidences,sometimes quite close, between the locations for `monster' legendsand those of modern fossil finds. Clearly distinguishable are a fewcases of presumed or palpable palaeontological Adj. 1. palaeontological - of or relating to paleontologypaleontological fictions and hoaxes,which are treated in chapter 6. Mayor begins well by exposing, in her Introduction, a`factoid' which has crept into popularizing histories of science:that the 5th-century philosopher Empedocles found fossilized elephantskulls in his native Sicily and interpreted them as bones of themythical Cyclopes. This assertion, endlessly repeated since, can betraced back no further than to a work of 1914, and throws unwelcomelight on the way in which popular histories are written. But the waryreader may be led to wonder how far Mayor's own treatment isvulnerable to similar weaknesses. For this, too, is written in adecidedly `chatty' style (`Notice a pattern here?' `Signspoint to yes'), with much use of the first-person narrative andpersonal communications, of a kind more familiar to readers of theNational Geographic than of scientific literature or the usualproductions of the Princeton University Press. The logical sequence oftopics is not always easy to follow and cross-references are always tochapters, not pages; only the existence of a good index spares thereader from long searches for a given passage. Yet, on the whole, such qualms are unjustified. There is a vastmass of accurately reported factual information here, buried under thecolloquialisms. Only once or twice does either the author'saccuracy or her judgement seem questionable. Thus, the oddly insistentassertion that `Elephants were unknown to Greeks' until afterAlexander the Great's campaigns (pp. 7, 55, 289) has grown by n. 11on p. 317 into `the largest living land animal known to the Greeks wasthe horse'. Whatever the sense of `unknown to' that is beingused here, it surely applies no more before 331 BC -- with thereferences by Herodotus (who also gives a careful description of thehippopotamus hippopotamus,herbivorous, river-living mammal of tropical Africa. The large hippopotamus, Hippopotamus amphibius, has a short-legged, broad body with a tough gray or brown hide. ), Ctesias and especially the detailed anatomical account ofAristotle -- than it does later. Again, the interesting culturalquestion of why fossil animal bones were so often interpreted as gianthuman remains is well treated; but the hypothesis put forward in somespecific cases, of an earlier discovery of such bones and theirinterment in a formal burial, followed by a later re-discovery, comes toseem far-fetched when it is wheeled out for the third time. With theCretan coastal land-slide of the Roman era (p. 63), the arithmetic isout by a factor of about 12 and the reference to Philostratus shouldread `4. 34'. Schliemann's fossilized vertebra vertebra/ver��te��bra/ (ver��te-brah) pl. ver��tebrae ? [L.] any of the 33 bones of the vertebral (spinal) column, comprising 7 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 5 sacral, and 4 coccygeal vertebrae . from Troy, ifhe really found it in his `Burnt City', was preserved not at thetime of the Trojan War, but of Troy II, a thousand years earlier. Afinal, more general weakness in the presentation is the maps: those onpp. 24, 62, 127 and 136 all have visible distortions and the first ofthese is contradicted in detail by that on p. 28; some of this vaguenesscreeps over into the text (Scythians on their way to the Altai Mountainswould hardly pass through the Gobi Desert). But none of these criticisms is significant when measured againstMayor's achievement in launching an essentially new field of study,and doing so in a form that should attract a very wide readership. ANTHONY SNODGRASS Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge