Classical Corner: Encounters with Fossil Giants

Home > Magazines > BAR > Fall 2021

Visiting mandatory Palestine in 1934, the intrepid British physical anthropologist Dorothea M.A. Bate learned of huge bones discovered when a well was dug in what is now central Bethlehem. After visiting the site and collecting some fragments, she realized that they were the fossilized remains of an elephant—an extinct elephant. These were mammoth remains, tentatively dated to the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene era, and nearly three million years old!1 Remains of numerous huge prehistoric animals have been discovered in the Levant, including elephants (mammoths among them) and a giant rhinoceros. Bate was not the first to discover huge […]

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.
All translations from classical literature, including the works of Josephus, are based upon the Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press.

2. For more on Hebron, see Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “Discovering Hebron: The City of the Patriarchs Slowly Yields Its Secrets,” BAR, September/October 2005; David Ben-Shlomo, “Hebron Still Jewish in Second Temple Times,” BAR, September/October 2017.

3. See Alan R. Millard, “King Og’s Iron Bed,” Bible Review, April 1990.

Endnotes

1.
Dorothea M.A. Bate, “Discovery of a Fossil Elephant in Palestine,” Nature 134 (1934), p. 219; Rivka Rabinovich and Adrian M. Lister, “The Earliest Elephants Out of Africa: Taxonomy and Taphonomy of Proboscidean Remains from Bethlehem,” Quaternary International 445 (July 2017), pp. 23–42.

2.
Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).

3.
This article is based upon Elisha Fine and Steven Fine, “Rabbinic Paleontology: Jewish Encounters with Fossil Giants in Roman Antiquity,” in Shana S. Schick, ed., Land and Spirit in Rabbinic Thought (Boston: Brill, 2021).