The years since the Wisconsin glaciation began its slow retreat to the north have witnessed the disappearance of many species of New World fauna. Perhaps the most spectacular of these were the American elephants—woolly mammoth, mastodon, imperial mammoth—animals that have for centuries provoked much interest and speculation. Why did the elephant, not to mention the giant beaver, the horse, the camel, the dire wolf, and many more become extinct in the Americas? When did the last survivors of the great herds die? Did the Indians hunt elephants? These and many other questions have often been asked, and, although many are still without satisfactory answers, the fund of information is steadily increasing.

Discoveries of association of human and proboscidean remains are by no means uncommon. As of 1950, MacGowan listed no less than twenty-seven. Finds of this nature have in fact been known for more than a hundred years, but the inertia of scientific opinion in the twentieth century has until very recently offered considerable resistance to the idea that man and mammoth were contemporaneous in America. For example, Clark Wissler, in the 1917 edition of The American Indian, stated positively that "the contemporaneity of man and the mammoth has not been established for North America." the tenacity of this idea was so great that as late as 1951 an attempt was made by Hugo Gross' discussion of Albert Koch's 1838 discovery in Gasconade County, Missouri, of charred mastodon bones together with projectile points and large stones weighing up to twenty-five pounds.

Koch took for granted that ancient hunters killed this mastodon mired in the clayey mud of the river bottom, tried to destroy him by fire, and at last stoned and speared him (for large stones were found upon and within the ash layer). Curiously, no one questioned this absurd conception of ancient hunters having annihilated such a bulk of flesh in this fashion . . . It is suggested that later Indians found a practically complete skeleton near their camp, perhaps exposed by a spring freshet, and for superstitious reasons tried to destroy it by burning and then hurling rocks at it. The same reasoning may account for the famous purported association of a partly burned mastodon skeleton and numerous potsherds at Alangasi, Ecuador. Two projectile points found near the Richmond mastodon in Indiana are very similar to those found by Koch and may also have become accidentally associated with a mastodon killed much earlier by carnivores . . .

With regard to the "absurd conception" of killing elephants with large stones, Henry Fairfield Osborn, eminent American paleontologist, some years ago reported the "discovery of giant killing flints by Dr. Carl Absolon of the University of Prague and the Museum of Brunn, one of the most distinguished archaeologists of central Europe, is therefore a revelation . . . of the killing methods employed, whereby the animals were driven into great pits and then felled by giant stones."