Thursday Things: Mammoths and Meanings Edition
13 June 2024. Vol 6 No 24. By Dan McGirt. #253
It’s Thursday Things! This week we interact with mammoths and change the meanings of words.
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Guess who’s back? Photo by April Pethybridge on Unsplash
Interacting with mammoths
There is a company called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences that is, among other projects, working on the “dextinction” of woolly mammoths. In their words:
Colossal’s landmark de-extinction project will be the resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth - or more specifically a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the Woolly Mammoth. It will walk like a Woolly Mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the Mammoth’s extinction.
Which sounds cool. Until you remember how the mammoths got themselves rendered extinct in the first place…
Siberia's 'mammoth graveyard' reveals 800-year human interactions with woolly beasts
Woolly mammoths are evocative of a bygone era, when Earth was gripped within an Ice Age. Current knowledge places early mammoth ancestors in the Pliocene (2.58–5.33 million years ago, Ma) before their populations expanded in the Pleistocene (2.58 Ma–11,700 years ago, kyr). However, as climate changed, their numbers dwindled to isolated populations in modern Siberia and Alaska, until their last dated survival 4 kyr ago.
In the East Siberian Arctic (>70 °N), there is not only evidence of significant woolly mammoth populations, but also how humans interacted with them, the focus of new research in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Oh, I can imagine how early humans “interacted” with woolly mammoths. That’s a nice euphemism for “hunted, killed, and ate them”.
Along the Berelekh River, Russia, a 'mammoth graveyard' can be found. Here, thousands of disarticulated bones, representing a minimum of 156 individual mammoths, found alongside an archaeological site indicate the close proximity of these two communities, forming the Berelekh geoarchaeological complex.
These interactions are not looking good for Team Mammoth.
The researchers suggest humans created these bone accumulations as a byproduct of the production of mammoth ivory technology…
We’ve always liked ivory.
Anyway, back to the de-extinction project. You may wonder why they want to bring back the mammoths aside from “because we can”. The rationale of the project is that re-introducing herds of large grazing animals to the Siberian tundra region would help revert the tundra back to grasslands:
The work of Dr. Sergey Zimov shows promise that tundra can be converted back to grasslands with the introduction of grazers even 10,000 years after their disappearance. The introduction of grazers to tundra generates a nutrient cycle that allows grasses to out-compete the tundra flora, converting the ecosystem in a manner that then favors the persistence of grazers and grasses.1
That’s all well and good. However, as our ancestors’ previous interactions with mammoths makes clear — mammoths are delicious!
And also a good source of ivory. And it’s Russia. So I take it as a given that there will be mammoth poachers interacting with any de-extincted mammoths.
I also predict mammoth burgers in our future.
Word adrift
The theory of plate tectonics accounts for the slow, yet undeniable, movement of Earth’s continents over time. Plate tectonics confirms and provides an explanatory mechanism for the idea of continental drift first proposed by German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener in 1912.2 The relative position of the continents changes slowly over time.
Similarly, the meanings of words change over time to. You might call it connotative drift if you were reaching for a bad pun, but the actual term for this linguistic phenomenon is semantic change. Or, if you’re still feeling saucy, semantic drift.
The meaning of words can change much faster than the position of continents, but both processes are always underway. It’s a fascinating process for any lover of language. Some words, over the course of centuries, or even decades, come to denote the opposite of their original meaning!
Here are a few fun lists of words that have changed meaning.
15 modern English words with different meanings in the past
clout (n): This term once referred to cloth or clothing but has evolved to mean influence or power. For example, with millions of followers on her social media platforms, the pop star has significant clout among young audiences.
degree (n): Degree initially referred to a step in a social rank or hierarchy, similar to what we might call a stage or level. It is now commonly used in the context of academic achievement or a unit of measurement.
fantastic (adj): This adjective once exclusively referred to things conceived in the imagination. Now, it is more frequently used to mean wonderful or fabulous.
nice (adj): This word evolved from meaning stupid, ignorant or foolish to describing something refined, pleasant or agreeable.
15 Words That Used to Mean Something Different
Because it’s Merriam-Webster, the authors of this page can’t help themselves. The explanations of the 15 headline words are sprinkled with multiple asides about the history and meanings of multiple other words. Here’s a sample word from the list:
Luxury
Original Definition: lechery, lust
Example: "What? shall we live like beasts promiscuously, Without distinction in foule luxurie?" - Juvenal (Translated by William Barkstead), That Which Seemes Best is Worst, 1617
About the Word: The current meaning of luxury carries a far more positive connotation today than it did when it first entered the language (a process that linguists refer to as amelioration).
Luxurious likewise had a more negative meaning when it first entered the language ('of, relating to, or expressive of especially unrestrained gratification of the senses').
Words Whose Meanings Have Changed Over Time
A shorter list, but again with interesting explanations.
Terrible
Like the word awful, “terrible” once had stronger and broader connotations than it does now. Literally meaning “causing terror or awe,” terrible was a title fit for the sixteenth century Russian Czar Ivan the Terrible, whose reign inspired widespread fear. “The Terror” was a period of the French Revolution marked by extreme bloodshed. Terms such as “reign of terror” and “terrorist” have their origins in this time period, when the word terror had a far more severe meaning than simply very, very bad.
Most of the words featured on these lists shifted to their present meanings long before anyone reading Thursday Things was born.
Thank you for reading!
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Continental Drift versus Plate Tectonics
We don’t perceive that the continents we live on are moving. After all, it’s not as if an airplane flight between Europe and Africa takes five hours one year but only three hours the next. But the continents actually are shifting, very slowly, relative to one another. In the early 20th century, a scientific theory called continental drift was proposed about this migration of the continents. That theory was initially ridiculed, but it paved the way for another theory called plate tectonics that scientists have now accepted to explain how Earth’s continents move.
Love, "That’s a nice euphemism for “hunted, killed, and ate them”. Which is exactly what I was initially thinking.