Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
The possibility of the contemporaneity of man and the mastodon in America has been a vexing one for more than a hundred years. In 1839 Albert C. Koch first reported that he had found evidence to support such a claim (Montagu 1942); and the situation today remains much as it was then, confused and without absolute certainty. It would, perhaps, be worthwhile at the outset to make explicit the distinction between the mammoth and the mastodon. Mammoths are fossil elephants, family Elephantide, which were restricted in the New World to North America.