The World Without Us

This was true. Jefferson, a passionate naturalist, had been enthralled for years by reports of huge bones strewn around a salt lick in the Kentucky wilderness. Descriptions suggested that they were similar to remains discovered in Siberia of a species of giant elephant, thought by European scientists to be extinct. African slaves had recognized big molars found in the Carolinas as belonging to some kind of elephant, and Jefferson was sure these were the same. In 1796 he received a shipment, supposedly of mammoth bones, from Greenbriar County, Virginia, but a huge claw immediately alerted him that this was something else, possibly some immense breed of lion. Consulting anatomists, he eventually identified it and is credited for the first description of a North America ground sloth, today named Megalonyx jefersoni.

Most exciting to him, though, were testimonies by Indians near the Kentucky salt lick, allegedly corroborated by other tribes farther west, that the tusked behemoth in question still lived in the north. After he became president, he sent Meriwether Lewis to study the Kentucky site on the way to joining William Clark for their historic mission. Jefferson had charged Lewis and Clark not only with traversing the Louisiana Purchase and seeking a northwest river route to the Pacific, but also with finding live mammoths, mastodons, or anything similarly large and unusual.

That part of their otherwise stunning expedition proved a failure; the most impressive big mammal they cited was the bighorn sheep. Jefferson later contented himself with sending Clark back to Kentucky for the mammoth bones that he displayed in the White House, today part of museum collections in the United States and France. He is often credited with founding the science of paleontology, though it was not really his intention. He’d hoped to belie an opinion, espoused by a prominent French scientist, that everything in the New World was inferior to the Old, including its wildlife.

He was also fundamentally mistaken about the meaning of fossil bones: he was convinced that they must belong to a living species, because he didn’t believe that anything ever went extinct. Although often considered America’s quintessential Age of Enlightenment intellectual, Jefferson’s beliefs corresponded to those held by many Deists and Christians of his day: that in a perfect Creation, nothing created was ever intended to disappear.

He articulated this credo, however, as a naturalist: “Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct.” It was a wish that imbued many of his writings: he wanted these animals to be alive, wanted to know them. His quest for knowledge led him to found the University of Virginia. Over the next two centuries, paleontologists there and elsewhere would show that many species had in fact died. Charles Darwin would describe how these extinctions were part of nature itself—one variety morphing into the next to meet changing conditions, another losing its niche to a more powerful competitor.

Yet one detail that nagged at Thomas Jefferson and others after him was that the big-mammal remains turning up didn’t seem all that old. These weren’t heavily mineralized fossils embedded in solid layers of rock. Tusks, teeth, and jawbones at places like Kentucky’s Big Bone Lick were still strewn on the ground, or protruding from shallow silt, or on the floor of caves. The big mammals they belonged to couldn’t have been gone that long. What had happened to them?

The Desert Laboratory—originally the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory—was built more than a century ago on Tumamoc Hill, a butte in southern Arizona overlooking what was then one of North America’s finest stands of cactus forest and, beyond that, Tucson. For nearly half the lab’s existence, a tall, broad-shouldered, affable paleoecologist named Paul Martin has been here. During that time the desert below Tumamoc’s saguaro-covered slopes disappeared under a snarl of dwellings and commerce. Today, the Lab’s fine old stone structures occupy what developers now covet as prime view property, which they continually scheme to wrest from its present owner, the University of Arizona. Yet when Paul Martin leans on his cane to gaze out his lab’s screened doorway, his frame of reference for human impact is not merely the past century, but the last 13,000 years—since people came to stay.