MULTIPLYING MYSTERIES

Three hundred years ago, the mystery of gigantic unexplained bones crossed the Atlantic to start a new chapter in America’s Thirteen Colonies. People in Europe and Asia had been puzzling over mammoth fossils for thousands of years, and even making money off them. Europeans had marveled at “giant” bones displayed in churches and public exhibitions, while kings and nobles spent fortunes for supposedly magical pieces of “unicorn” horn. Tusks from Siberia’s legendary underground monsters had long been sold as valuable ivory in the markets of China. But when similar fossils also turned up in the American colonies, these multiplying threads began to weave together into a global mystery—a mystery that would help to shape the emerging new scientific age.

It began in 1705, when rainwater washed huge teeth and bones out of a cliffside in the sparsely-settled frontier of New York’s upper Hudson River valley. Other fossils were soon found nearby. These quickly became famous throughout the colony as the bones of giant humans. After personally examining one of the massive teeth, a powerful Puritan minister named Cotton Mather declared that “it must be” a giant human tooth, for it “has the perfect form of the eye-tooth of a man.”