Elephant Teeth at Stono: Enslaved Africans and an Early Fossil Find

Probably in the early 1720s, three or four teeth of a large animal were dug out of the ground at a place called Stono, in the colony of South Carolina. The people who looked at them and said what they were had been born in Africa and were enslaved in the colony. We know about them from a single sentence written by the English naturalist Mark Catesby, who recorded their verdict and agreed with it.¹ That sentence is an early written record of a fossil from British North America being matched to a living animal by comparison with known anatomy. It is also a record of expert knowledge held by people whose names no one wrote down.

This article sets out what Catesby wrote, what it can and cannot support, and how the identification looked once Thomas Jefferson and Georges Cuvier began arguing over American “mammoths” at the end of the century.

One sentence in Catesby’s Account of Carolina

Catesby spent about three years in South Carolina, from May 1722, collecting plants and animals for a group of London sponsors, before moving on to the Bahamas. He traveled widely in the Lowcountry and stayed on plantations whose wealth depended on enslaved African and Native American labor.² His great illustrated Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands came out in parts over the next two decades. The second volume, whose title page is dated 1743, carried a prose essay, “An Account of Carolina and the Bahama Islands,” describing the climate, soil, people and agriculture of the region.³

The Stono teeth appear on page vii of that essay, in a paragraph about fossils. Catesby first argues that the Deluge left its marks across North America (“There is no part of the Globe where the signs of a deluge more evidently appears than in many parts of the Northern Continent of America”) and describes fossil shells and sea-animal bones found deep in Virginia soil. Then he writes:

At a place in Carolina called Stono, was dug out of the earth three or four teeth of a large animal, which, by the concurring opinion of all the Negroes, native Africans, that saw them, were the grinders of an Elephant: And in my opinion they could be no other; I having seen some of the like that are brought from Africa.¹

Apart from capitals and punctuation, the wording is the same in the first edition and in the revised edition of 1754.³¹ Its order matters. The identification comes first and belongs to the Africans; Catesby’s agreement follows, supported by his own memory of elephant teeth shipped to Britain.

What the sentence does and does not say

Catesby’s sentence is short, and a good deal of what is now repeated about it is not in it.

He gives no date. The year usually attached to the find, 1725, appears in the 2014 South Carolina law discussed below, and it fits the years Catesby was in the colony, but he does not state it.⁴² The safest wording is that the teeth were found by the time Catesby wrote, probably during or shortly before his stay in the early 1720s.

He does not say the teeth came from a swamp, or from a named plantation. He says “a place in Carolina called Stono” and “dug out of the earth.” The 2014 law describes teeth “discovered in a swamp”; one recent museum blog places the find at “Stono Plantation” and says Catesby “spoke with the enslaved people” there.⁴⁵ Those details may come from other evidence, but they are not in Catesby’s text, and this article could not trace them.

He does not say who dug the teeth up, how many Africans examined them, or whether he saw the teeth himself. He reports a “concurring opinion of all” who saw them. That phrase implies that several people saw the teeth and that all of them agreed.¹

He does not name anyone. Henrietta McBurney, an art historian and curator who has written a book-length study of Catesby’s art and science, notes that in his whole book and his letters to his sponsors he recorded the words of an enslaved African only once, in an anecdote about a rattlesnake found in his bed.² The Stono passage is a collective verdict rather than a voice, but it is unusual in giving that verdict the first and decisive place.

Finally, it does not tell us what animal the teeth came from. They are not known to survive. Modern retellings usually call them mammoth teeth, a reasonable inference discussed below, but an inference all the same.⁵

Knowledge carried across the Atlantic

Why would people newly arrived in Carolina know an elephant’s grinder when they saw one? Catesby’s own explanation of his agreement points to a likely answer: elephant teeth came from Africa. He had seen them only as imports. The Africans at Stono may well have seen them, or living elephants, in Africa, though no record says so.

The sources allow only a general picture of where they came from. McBurney writes that Charleston was among the largest ports for enslaved Africans in this period, receiving captives from Senegambia, present-day Ghana and other coastal regions of West Africa.² Elephants were part of those landscapes. The Portuguese ship Bom Jesus, lost in 1533, carried more than a hundred elephant tusks. DNA from 44 of them traced the ivory to forest elephants from at least 17 genetically distinct herds across West Africa, which hints that several West African communities were supplying ivory to traders.⁶ No record says that any person at Stono had hunted elephants, butchered one or traded ivory. But living alongside elephants, or seeing their skulls and jaws, was an ordinary possibility for people from these regions in a way it was not for most colonists.

Catesby elsewhere treated Africans in Carolina as carriers of knowledge from their homelands. In the agricultural section of the same essay he notes that a kind of millet was “at first introduced from Africa by the negroes,” and that another grain was rarely seen except on their plantings, because they “brought it from Guinea, their native country.”¹ McBurney describes him learning from enslaved Africans as well as Native Americans about the uses of plants and animals for food, medicine and tools.² The Stono verdict belongs with these observations: knowledge from Africa, applied in America, and written down by a European who benefited from it.

What made the teeth recognizable? The grinding teeth of elephants are built of many thin enamel plates stacked side by side. A paper by Hans Sloane in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1728 catalogues a fossil grinder dug up in Northamptonshire as an elephant’s and quotes the Reverend Mr. Morton’s description of it as showing “13 or 14 parallel” plates.⁷ Mammoth molars share this plated structure with living elephants; the molars of the mastodon, by contrast, carry high ridges (the name means “nipple tooth”) and look quite different. Mammoths are close relatives of living elephants; mastodons are only distant ones.⁸ A tooth that experienced eyes took for an elephant’s was most likely a mammoth’s, which is why later writers call the Stono teeth mammoth teeth. Readers interested in how much older collectors made of large fossil bones can compare the bone deposits of ancient Egypt.

Jefferson, Cuvier and a confusion of names

Later in the century the American fossil debate centered elsewhere. Huge bones and teeth from the Ohio valley became famous, and English and American writers began calling the unknown animal the “mammoth.”⁹

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) is the best-known statement of that period’s thinking. Jefferson describes “the mammoth (for so the incognitum has been called)” as an animal with grinders “studded with four or five rows of blunt points,” which is to say a mastodon in modern terms. He argues that it was not an elephant, and one of his reasons is striking in light of Stono: “I have never heard an instance, and suppose there has been none, of the grinder of an elephant being found in America.” He also wrote that there seemed to be “no certain vestiges” of the animal south of the North Holston salines, at about 36.5 degrees north, and he declined to believe that any species could become extinct.¹⁰ Catesby’s report of elephant grinders from coastal South Carolina, well to the south, had been in print for about four decades.

It was the French anatomist Georges Cuvier who sorted out the names. In his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles (1812) he complained that the English and Americans had wrongly transferred the word “mammoth,” which belonged to the true fossil elephant of Siberia, to the Ohio animal, and he gave the Ohio animal a new genus name, mastodon. He also observed that this Ohio animal had been the first to convince naturalists that species could be destroyed, and suggested that confusing the two animals probably lay behind Jefferson’s idea that the “mammoth” reached its full strength in the frozen north, as the elephant did in the tropics.⁹

Cuvier also read Catesby. In the memoir on living and fossil elephants he quotes the Stono passage in French, citing it to the appendix of Catesby’s second volume, page vii, and says that the American naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton had pointed it out to him. He accepted it as early evidence of true fossil elephants in America, alongside a true elephant molar illustrated in John Drayton’s book on South Carolina and teeth that Barton had seen from Biggin Swamp, near the head of the western branch of the Cooper River, found in 1795 mixed with mastodon bones. He also added a caution. Barton, he wrote, was right that the passage shows only that the Stono teeth were elephant-type teeth, built of plates, not that they matched African elephants in particular; Cuvier added that neither Catesby nor the Africans could have told elephant species apart at a time when no naturalist yet did so.⁹

That caution is fair, and it leaves the achievement intact. To recognize a buried tooth as belonging to the elephant family, rather than to a giant, a hippopotamus or an unknown monster, was the right answer at the level of detail anyone in the 1720s could reach.

Credit, then and now

In 2014 South Carolina named the Columbian mammoth its official state fossil. The bill began with a suggestion from an eight-year-old, Olivia McConnell, who pointed out that mammoth teeth excavated in the state in 1725 were among the first vertebrate fossils found in North America. Its passage was briefly complicated by a Senate amendment about the Sixth Day of Creation, which was removed in conference.¹¹ The act’s preamble says that fossilized mammoth teeth “were discovered in a swamp in South Carolina in 1725” and that the discovery “has been credited as the first scientific identification of a North American vertebrate fossil.”⁴

The preamble does not mention the people who made the identification. Catesby, writing in the 1740s, had put them at the center of his sentence. The legal text, by recording the discovery and the identification without the identifiers, illustrates how easily that credit can drop out.

How much can fairly be claimed? The surviving evidence is one sentence by one naturalist, reporting a collective opinion he agreed with. It supports a modest but real statement: that African-born people enslaved in South Carolina correctly recognized fossil teeth as belonging to an elephant-like animal, very probably drawing on knowledge of African elephants (Catesby does not record their reasons), and that a London naturalist published their judgment as the basis of his own. Whether this was the very first identification of its kind in North America depends on how “scientific” and “identification” are defined, and the claim rests on the act’s wording rather than on any source read here.⁴ Nothing in the record suggests a lucky guess. The likeliest reading is comparative anatomy done by people who knew the comparison animal, decades before naturalists in Europe and America agreed on which large fossil teeth belonged to which animals.¹⁹

Footnotes

1. Catesby 1754, vol. 1, “An Account of Carolina,” p. vii and agriculture section. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. McBurney, Yale University Press blog, August 5, 2021. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Catesby, vol. 2 (title page 1743), “An Account of Carolina,” and catalog description. ↩ ↩²

4. South Carolina Act No. 177 (2014), preamble and Section 1. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Rospond, American Philosophical Society blog, “Unearthing Stories,” Part I, September 3, 2024. ↩ ↩²

6. Temming, Science News, December 17, 2020. ↩

7. Sloane 1728, Phil. Trans. 35, pp. 457-471. ↩

8. Illinois State Museum, “Mammoth Versus Mastodon.” ↩

9. Cuvier 1812, tome II, “Éléphans,” pp. 55-56; “Grand mastodonte,” pp. 1-3, 19-20. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query VI. ↩

11. NCSE, May 19, 2014. ↩