There’s an old saying: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” As naturalists struggled to solve the mammoth mystery, they were misled by things that everyone thought they knew for sure: that the Earth was young and Noah’s flood was a real historical event. But these things just weren’t so.
Breyne sent his own arguments and Messerschmidt’s evidence to Sloane in England. When this material was published in English in 1737, it proved that mammoths were elephants of some sort. But Breyne ignored the clue of the wooly skin spotted by Messerschmidt’s witness. Breyne insisted instead that elephants from warm climates had been carried to Siberia by the waters of “the universal Deluge of Noah,” and claimed that mammoth fossils were just more scientific proof of the historical truth of the Bible story. He wasn’t alone. In those days, naturalists saw “proof” of Noah’s flood everywhere they looked. Valleys and mountains were supposedly carved by the flood; fossils were buried by the flood. It would be another century before geologists realized that the flood was a myth. In fact, the features of the Earth had been shaped by natural processes over billions of years.