The New York Herald
1903
with commentary from
The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal
November-December 1903
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NOTE |
The claim that a lost city destroyed by the Flood of Noah and populated with elephants had been found the arid region between Texas and Mexico City is a hoax based very loosely on a real report about the discovery of two mastodon or mammoth tusks filed by Mexican scholar Nicolás León in August 1903. The story was circulated to newspapers in 1903, and we find the story turning up in Theosophical literature and Mormon apologetics, as well as in the work of fringe writer William R. Corliss from including it in his 1978 book Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts. The quoted news article below was published in The New York Herald, and I add to it commentary from the American Antiquarian in the November/December issue for 1903.
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ELEPHANT REMAINS IN MEXICO.
From the City of Mexico comes a statement bearing the signature of Dr. Nicholas Leon, archaeologist of the National Museum of Mexico. The signature would justify the belief that proper investigation of the facts related has been made.
The one great fact is that an ancient city, which was located near the present town of Paredon, in the state of Coahuila, some 500 miles north of the City of Mexico, was suddenly destroyed in some past age by an overflow of water and mud, and that its remains are still existent on the spot. Many massive walls have been found, but they are covered with a mass of deposited earth, sixty feet in thickness. And mingled in this earth are human skeletons, the tusks of elephants, etc., distributed in a way which indicates that the overflow of water and mud was sudden, giving no time for escape.
The account which has fallen under our notice is somewhat brief. We cannot vouch for its accuracy, and simply present the report:
The one great fact is that an ancient city, which was located near the present town of Paredon, in the state of Coahuila, some 500 miles north of the City of Mexico, was suddenly destroyed in some past age by an overflow of water and mud, and that its remains are still existent on the spot. Many massive walls have been found, but they are covered with a mass of deposited earth, sixty feet in thickness. And mingled in this earth are human skeletons, the tusks of elephants, etc., distributed in a way which indicates that the overflow of water and mud was sudden, giving no time for escape.
The account which has fallen under our notice is somewhat brief. We cannot vouch for its accuracy, and simply present the report:
The discoveries made at Paradon, in Coahuila, are the most extraordinary that have been made in Mexico, and possibly anywhere in the world. The excavations made so far show that a large city was buried not far from the present town of Paradon by an immense amount of earth, which was evidently washed down from the mountains by flood. How long ago the catastrophe occurred cannot be determined.
Portions of buildings so far unearthed show that the city — at least the largest of the cities that were covered by the debris of the flood, there being at least three cities destroyed — was very extensive. The indications are that there were many massive structures in the city and that they were of a class of architecture not to be found elsewhere in Mexico.
According to the estimates of the scientists under whose directions the excavations are being made, the city in question had a population of at least 50,000.
The destruction wrought by the flood was complete. Skeletons of the human inhabitants and of the animals are strewn all through the debris. Measurements show that the debris is on an average sixty feet deep where the largest of the cities stood.
Most remarkable of the minor finds made at Paradon is that of the remains of elephants. Never before in the history of Mexico has it been ascertained positively that elephants were ever in the service of the inhabitants.
The remains of the elephants show plainly that the inhabitants of the buried cities made elephants work for them. Elephants were as much in evidence in the streets of the cities as horses. Upon many of the tusks that have been found were rings of silver. Most of the tusks have an average length, for grown elephants, of three feet and an average diameter at the root of six inches.
Judging from the remains of the elephants so far unearthed, the animals were about ten feet in height and sixteen to eighteen feet in length, differing little from those at present in existence.
The flood resulted from an immense cloudburst, perhaps the most extraordinary that the world has ever known, from the bursting of some great natural reservoir in the mountains or from some cause as yet inexplicable.
The suggestion which has been made by some investigators that the cities were destroyed by landslides does not hold good, according to the government geologists.
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[Now, these statements in reference to the elephants' bones found among the ruined cities need confirmation, before they are accepted by the majority of archaeologists. It is true that the tusks and bones of mastodons are frequently found in the swamps of Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, but they are supposed to belong to the same species which are found in the frozen mud of Siberia and the gravels of the Northwest coast. A species covered with hair and adapted to the cold climate, and quite different from any that would be found as far south as Mexico.
The circumpolar regions are full of these creatures, which have perished, but their bodies have been preserved in the ice-beds. Other animals, such as the buffalo and bison, have over run portions of this continent, since the days of the mastodon, but none of them reached as far south as Mexico. The cities of Mexico are supposed to have been built not earlier than 1500 A. D.—about 500 years ago. If any were built earlier, they are in ruins, but no remains of elephants have been discovered among the ruins, in fact no semblance of the elephant has been recognized in the sculpture, except in a few cases, where what resembles an elephant's trunk, or the trunk of a tapir, is found on the sculptured columns at Copan. The discovery of elephant bones would be too important a matter to be ignored, but the article seems sensational and has been sent to the newspapers as a sensational item, and not to the scientific societies, so far as we have learned.
The whole subject of the presence of the mastodon on the American continent is discussed in the August and September numbers of The Records of the Past. The arguments which favor a recent date are: first, the presence of the bones in the peat swamps of Ohio and Michigan; second, the drawing on the Mercer tablet of an elephant attacked by Indians; third, the figure of an elephant on a pottery pitcher from the cliff-dwellings. All these are, however, outside of Mexico, and so prove nothing in reference to this sensational report.—ED.]
The circumpolar regions are full of these creatures, which have perished, but their bodies have been preserved in the ice-beds. Other animals, such as the buffalo and bison, have over run portions of this continent, since the days of the mastodon, but none of them reached as far south as Mexico. The cities of Mexico are supposed to have been built not earlier than 1500 A. D.—about 500 years ago. If any were built earlier, they are in ruins, but no remains of elephants have been discovered among the ruins, in fact no semblance of the elephant has been recognized in the sculpture, except in a few cases, where what resembles an elephant's trunk, or the trunk of a tapir, is found on the sculptured columns at Copan. The discovery of elephant bones would be too important a matter to be ignored, but the article seems sensational and has been sent to the newspapers as a sensational item, and not to the scientific societies, so far as we have learned.
The whole subject of the presence of the mastodon on the American continent is discussed in the August and September numbers of The Records of the Past. The arguments which favor a recent date are: first, the presence of the bones in the peat swamps of Ohio and Michigan; second, the drawing on the Mercer tablet of an elephant attacked by Indians; third, the figure of an elephant on a pottery pitcher from the cliff-dwellings. All these are, however, outside of Mexico, and so prove nothing in reference to this sensational report.—ED.]
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Source: "Elephant Remains in Mexico," The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 25 (Nov.-Dec. 1903), 395-397; "Brief Glimpses of the Prehistoric World," Century Path, November 8, 1903, 8.
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