The Mammoth Wars, the Land Bridge, and the Founding of Skull and Bones

Long ago, before the dawn of what we would call civilization, man was locked in an epic struggle against one of his many nemeses, the wooly mammoth. For years the mammoth had free run of the earth, eating primitive man's crops, destroying his settlements, and stealing his women. All until one of man's most controversial inventions was developed. That inventions was the stick.

Though the stick was of little use in its own right, it led to the development of many of the world's most important inventions, such as the cane, the cattle prod, the television remote control, the wheel, fire, the spear, the pool cue, and the flaming spear. Though some look back on the development of the flaming spear as man's darkest hour, others consider it to be the true beginning of civilization. It is inescapable that the flaming spear changed man, and his place in this world, forever.

Armed with this incredible weapon, man became the earth's ultimate killing machine. He was no longer the world's bitch. His bitch was now the world. He no longer had to fear the mammoth, kowtowing to him, constantly fetching him cold "brewskies" and what not, all the while calling him "sir," or, in the case of the mammoth tsar, "Your Mammothjesty." Though there is no official record of the fall of the first mammoth to a flaming human spear, there is a painting on one of the cave walls at Lascaux in France depicting a similar occurrence.



Though some scientists believe that the speech bubbles were written in by vandals after the original conception of the image, mainstream anthropologists consider such theories "radical" or "fringe thinking" at best.

The potent combination of spear and fire led to another important discovery: Meat is damn tasty. People had seen animals eat each other before, but until the advent of the flaming spear, man found himself becoming exceedingly sick after eating the flesh of other creatures. Scientists believe that humans first began to cook their meat after killing a mammoth with flaming spears and finding that the burning corpse emitted a most delicious odor, burnt mammoth wool! They also found the cooked mammoth flesh to be quite delicious, and far easier to swallow. Eventually, man, like so many killer sharks, developed a taste for mammoth flesh. Until this time, the mammoths had seen their quarrels with humanity as jocular rivalries, petty pranks, and what not. But now that the humans had begun to eat their flesh, IT was officially ON. By "IT" I mean war, and by "ON" I mean on.

The humans called it World War XXIV, while their soldiers called it delicious. The mammoths fought hard, but nothing that they were able to muster could stand up to the incredible power of the flaming spear. Any child who has played "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Flaming Scissors" can understand why the mammoths tusks were of little use against the mighty flaming spears. The human armies hunted the mammoths across Europe and into Asia. The mammoth tsar, seeing that defeat was inevitable, divided his army in two and sent half to the easternmost reaches of the Asian continent. Once there, these mammoths began work on a secret project to save their race, while the other half attempted to hold the ravenously hungry human army at bay in the west.

Despite the fact that the humans were armed with the ultimate weapon of the age, their struggle was by no means easy. Mammoths weighed 6-8 tons. That was a lot of meat. Though casualties were few, and mostly due to messing around with the spears and ruptured stomachs, the human army became increasingly fat as they marched eastward. This was further enervated by a shift in mammoth tactics. Instead of making fruitless attempts at goring, the mammoths had begun baking delicious dinner rolls and leaving them on candle-lit tables for the human armies. After gorging themselves on rolls, the human appetite for meat was found to be much diminished. Though the shift of mammoth tactics confused the human generals greatly, what happened next brought them to new heights of noncomprehension. One day there were suddenly no more mammoths. They had all just vanished, and no one could quite say where they had gone.

The human army marched east across Asia. They marched and marched. Still there were no mammoths. The mammoths had fled all the way to the edge of the land, to the sea, which the humans hated and feared. They had then constructed a huge land bridge spanning the Bering Straight and escaped to what was then known as the "New World." Though their original plan had been to destroy the land bridge after crossing it, they were easily excitable, and upon seeing the wide expanses of their new home, became distracted and frolicked away. This mistake led to their eventual extinction, as one particularly intrepid and hungry group of humans crossed the land bridge and continued to hunt the mammoths for many generations. These people shall forever be incorrectly remembered as the world's first sailors. Though the mammoths' existence on the new continent was relatively short lived, they did several things which ensured that their legacy would live on long after they were gone. Not least among these accomplishments was the establishment of a secret organization known as Skull and Bones.