Geology Reference
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Homo diluvii, the fossil Johann Scheuchzer interpreted as a victim of Noah's Flood ( by Alan Witschonke based on plate
XLIX of Scheuchzer's Sacred Physics (1731) ).
These were not the only strange bones attributed to Noah's Flood. All across Europe
large fossils were publicly displayed as the remains of the giants mentioned in scripture.
Scheuchzer didn't get it all wrong, because he pointed out that the enormous stone teeth of
those purported to have drowned in the Flood actually belonged to something more like an
elephant than a person.
The expansion of European power and influence in the eighteenth century led to the dis-
covery of giant bones in Siberia and North America. In 1692, Peter the Great's envoy to
China, Ysbrand Ides, found frozen tusks and hairy elephant carcasses exposed in a Siberian
riverbank. His report claimed these behemoths lived before the biblical flood, their frozen
hulks preserved by a frigid post-Flood climate.
Further expeditions returned to St. Petersburg with the partial remains of huge creatures
that the indigenous Siberians called “mammut,” a name European tongues promptly
changed to mammoth. Within a few decades, such discoveries convinced natural historians
that there was an abundance of fossil elephants in Siberia, a place too cold for African an-
imals to survive today. With the closest living elephants located in India, natural histori-
ans tended to interpret the Siberian bones as those of creatures swept north from Asia by a
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