The Mammoth Tusk

A few days ago, I was in Las Vegas.

Not for fun.

Droves of tourists regularly pour into Vegas seeing it as the capital of fun. In my mind, Vegas is pretty much the antithesis of fun. It’s more akin to the antechamber of hell (not as bad as Bakersfield, but close…) Not that I have anything against drinking, gambling or sex workers. Far from it. My distaste from Vegas is not born from some kind of moral reservations (I have very few of those...) It’s just that it smells of desperation. It feels like the place where people who are enslaved by jobs they hate go take a break from the overarching misery to forget about it all between the sounds of slot machines, massive amounts of booze and gaudy imitations of real life. But to each their own.

All this to say, I wasn’t there on vacation, but to work. Along with two friends, I run a company selling medicinal mushrooms and this trip was about that. I really don’t want to turn this essay into an advertisement, since it’s not about that, so I’ll write more about the company and the mushrooms at the bottom of the post for people who may be interested, but I’ll not subject the rest of you to this if it’s not your thing.

Well… okay, great. Then, what is this essay about?

On my way to the conference, I had to walk through a couple of casinos. So, there I was power-walking at crazy speed, dribbling between drunken tourists on their way to lose their money, when something caught my eye and I stopped dead in my tracks.

Sitting there in a glass case, in the middle of the Treasure Island casino, was a large mammoth tusk. If that’s not weird enough, the tusk was decorated with the most incredible carvings. Unsurprisingly, since this was not in a museum, but near the cashier’s cages of a gambling hall, the sign on the display did a particularly atrocious job at failing to answer most of the questions popping in my head. How old was the mammoth tusk? Where was it found? Who, when and why carved it? How did it end up in a Vegas casino?!?

All I got was that the mammoth tusk was ancient (yeah… no shit…) and that the carvings were done in China over a long period of time. Most mammoths went extinct over 10,000 years ago, so that’s a starting point. And a little bit of digging online told me that the carvings were done during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The carvings are of indescribable beauty. Hundreds of figures including warriors, deities, horses, pagodas, and many more. The details are unreal. Luckily, you don’t have to rely on my verbal description, so I’ll post a video here.

For pictures, since I can’t find anything reliably copyright free and I still have bad memories from interacting with an awful British photographer hounding me for having used a pic of his on a website, I’ll soberly abstain from posting and suggest you search for them online. They are pretty spectacular. Can you imagine the pressure of carving an ancient mammoth tusk in which other artists had already put so much work? Truly, a situation with no room for mistakes.

A mammoth tusk from thousands of years ago, incredible artistry from Ming Dynasty masters… right next to tourists spilling margaritas while cussing the slot machines. Surreal, indeed.

In addition to the artistic beauty of the whole thing, the mammoth tusk spoke to my never-ending fascination with prehistory. Of course, studying prehistory is frustrating since, by definition, there are no written sources from back then, and we can only rely on the tiny bit that archaeology can reveal. And yet, the vast majority of the time we have been around as human beings was ‘prehistory’. For countless generations, all of our ancestors lived in small bands of nomadic hunters and gatherers. That lifestyle is what has shaped us. The domestication of plants, farming, the emergence of organized states, urban centers, and social classes are relatively recent inventions. Industrialization happened the other day—relatively speaking. Our current lifestyle is the historical equivalent of a blink of an eye. We know plenty about a few hundred years of our history, and next to nothing about tens of thousands of it. Mystery surrounds much of it. Often, I try to imagine what it carving a living out of a wilderness inhabited by megafauna entailed. Even terms like ‘wilderness’ probably made no sense, since we were an integral part of the wilderness. Nothing existed outside of it. Picture trying to survive with fire and sharp sticks in a world populated by mammoths that could weigh up to 30,000 lbs, 20 feet tall giant sloths, and much larger ancestors of elk and bison. Thanks to bravery, cooperative hunting, and a willingness to risk life and limb, you and your people miraculously manage to bring down one of these huge animals only to have your kill contested by saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, cave lions, or my favorite… the short-faced bear, a terrifying beast that could run 40 miles per hour, weigh up to 2,000 lbs and smell a drop of blood from miles away. What did our ancestors who lived that life feel and think?

During lockdown, my obsession with prehistory pushed me to buy a PlayStation just for the sake of playing Far Cry Primal, a visually stunning video game set in a fictional version of our ancient past. And this same obsession is what stopped me in my tracks in the midst of a Vegas casino to admire the oddly placed mammoth tusk.

P.S. Now that my tale is done, for anyone who may be interested, I’ll talk a bit more about the medicinal mushrooms I mentioned earlier. A little over a year ago, a couple of friends of mine asked me to join a company they had set up focused on medicinal mushrooms. Not magic mushrooms, mind you. Medicinal ones, which means species like Cordyceps, Turkey Tail, Lion’s Mane, Chaga and Reishi. At the risk of oversimplifying, Cordyceps possesses antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and improve athletic performance (I can personally testify to this). Turkey Tail saved my guts from a bout of ‘Moctezuma’s Revenge’ after a trip to Mexico. Lion's Mane is known to positively impact cognitive function. Chaga is an immune-booster while Reishi improves sleep quality, tackles anxiety and is on a first-name basis with relaxation. Since I didn’t know much about medicinal mushrooms, before agreeing to my friends’ proposal, I used the mushrooms for a while, and accepted once I started seeing some noticeable effects. While medicinal mushrooms have been used for centuries in a medical context (Chinese medicine, for example), they are currently experiencing a boom in the West. One thing that differentiates what we offer compared to what many companies sell is that we use nothing but mushrooms, with no other ingredients. Not even coating, or binding agents on our tablets. I could go on, but I’ll try to keep this short. If you would like to learn more, check out what we offer at https://purestmushrooms.com/ and if you decide to give it a try, you can use the code historyonfire at checkout for a discount.