[PW] Mammoth survival

[Fuller, Thomas (US - Washington D.C.)]

This is just my idle curiosity, but I've wondered about it for years and
was recently reminded of it.

John Bakeless, in his <America as Seen by its First Explorers: The Eyes
of Discovery> (1950) tells of an English sailor, one David Ingram, who
was put ashore somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico in 1568 and walked
across the continent to the East Coast, to be picked up by a French
ship.  In 1582 he reported that he had seen, among other marvels (some
clearly fictional), "Eliphantes".

Now, there neither are nor were true elephants in the new World, but
there were mammoths.  Bakeless speculates that Ingram hay have been "the
only white man who ever saw a live American mammoth" (p. 180).  He notes
that Thomas Jefferson, 200 years later, was assured by Indians that
mammoths still survived in the interior.  I think he's talking about
Query VI of Jefferson's <Notes on Virginia> -- see

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/JEFFERSON/ch06.html

Now, most paleontological sources say that the American mammoth became
extinct thousands of years ago.  My question is:  Is there respectable
scientific evidence that the mammoth might have survived into the
present era?  Or was Jefferson just being ribbed by mendacious Indians,
and is Bakeless just a credulous non-scientist?  I can't seem to find
anyone who actually believes this, but it's a good enough story that I
wonder if anyone has seriously evaluated it.

May as well kick off the New Year with a nutty one, say I.

-- Tom, more mammoth-like than he wants to be 

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