Of Ancient Egypt and Pygmy Mammoths

The "mammoth" (or is it?) in the tomb of Rekhmire

On many occasions, there have been times in which unusual animals are depicted in ancient artwork, often leading to lengthy conversation and debate in the zoological literature. While we can handwave these illustrations as being stylized or inaccurate in their renderings of fauna (the notion that ancient peoples didn’t have imaginations or bad artists is such an untrue and bizarre idea), there is as well the possibility that they are meant to show actual oddities of nature that are lost to time. Each instance should therefore be considered on a case-by-case basis.

One famous example, the subject of today’s post, is of a figure seen on the tomb decorations of Rekhmire, a nobleman from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt the time period in which the North African empire was at the height of its power and influence. Rekhmire was an extremely minor figure in the long history of Egypt, but his tomb was recovered in great preservation and detail, allowing us priceless knowledge about human life in the era.

What makes the tomb of interest for naturalists is that there’s a clear depiction of a small proboscidean on the far-left of the mural. One might simply assume that it’s a baby, but as it seems to have tusks and thick hair it has also been suggested that it’s a dwarf mammoth. In a 1994 article published in Nature Baruch Rosen, an Israeli archeologist, proposed this hypothesis. I believe that he was the first to do so. Rosen is still an active scientist, and he has published a few other writings about animals in archeology, though it seems that the vast amount of his work is unrelated to zoological issues.

Burchard Brentjes was the first to propose a mammoth identity, he falsely believed the species was native to Ancient Syria. For obvious reasons, these claims are not widely known.

I at first believed that Rosen was the first to propose this theory, however my research for this post shows it to be older than that. In 1969, German scholar Burchard Brentjes proposed that the now-extinct Asian elephants of West Asia were in fact woolly mammoths, though of regular size. He used various ancient illustrations, including the Rekhmire tomb art to support this. His hypothesis, while unorthodox and interesting, never got traction for there’s no good reason to think woolly mammoths were ever native to the Near East. I don’t know if Rosen was aware of the ideas of Brentjes, though it’s possible the two men came to their conclusions separately.

Spectacular paleoart of the Wrangel Island Mammoths. As unusual as it seems, there were surely occasions in which the animals interacted with polar bears.

But dwarf woolly mammoths, you may be asking? It could be factual, a population lived on remote Wrangel Island as recently as 1700 BCE, long after the rest of their kind had died out. What makes them stand out is that they are atypically small for mammoths, suggesting insular dwarfism. The genome of a member of this population has even been sequenced, the mutations found in the genetic code imply that the population was sickly as the result of lacking genetic diversity. Oh, the perils of inbreeding. Wrangel Island mammoths had defects affecting “neurological development, male fertility, insulin signaling and sense of smell”, though the possibility remains that this only troubled the individual sampled and not the population at large. Oh, the perils of small data representation.

I would also like to make the point that the entire notion that Wrangel Island dwarfs is still extremely controversial. It has been suggested by Alexei Tikhonov, Larry Agenbroad, and Sergey Vartanyan that the remains recovered do not actually show evidence of true insular dwarfism, compared to that of other species affected by this evolutionary process. Nevertheless, these were the last of the woolly mammoths, alive that the same time of which great civilizations were sprouting all over Eurasia.

If the mammoth truly is from Wrangel Island that would have huge implications due to the fact that the isle is off the coast of Siberia. Egyptians with trade routes going that far northeast? Suddenly the whole story seems even more unlikely. Again, there’s additionally the hypothesis that it’s being drawn small for stylistic purposes, Rosen brought up that possibility. But that also seems hard to swallow, as none of the other creatures (bears, giraffes, horses, oxen, etc.) depicted seem to shrunken down by the artist(s).

A Medditerrian Dwarf Elephant

Beyond a dwarf mammoth or a bad rendering of a typical elephant, what else could it be? A third possibility, one which I really like, is that it’s a member of one of several pygmy elephant species that lived in the Mediterranean. Proboscideans have undergone insular dwarfism a number of times. The Tilos dwarf elephant, native to a small Greek island, lived around 2300 BCE, though it’s possible that they survived for a few centuries more. Could it be possible that some of these miniature pachyderms were captured by humans and traded and sold to be curiosities in menageries? Not a super high probability, but worth considering. The Tilos suggestion is merely a best guess, nothing rules out the chance of the animal coming from another island species, including a possibly undiscovered one.

As some of the Mediterranean dwarfs have been suggested to be members of Mammuthus rather than Elephas or Palaeoloxodon, some dwarf elephant populations of the region might’ve been true mammoths, providing an explanation for the appearance of brown hair on the drawing. A fourth possibility is that the animal is just a young Asian or African elephant that is suffering from precocious tusk growth, not unlike how some humans experience early puberty. This has been observed in wild elephants, and the domed head figure suggests an Asiatic origin.