Sean Sullivan may live in modern-day Wausau, but often times his mind is set in the Stone Age. Known across Wisconsin as the “Mammoth Hunter,” Sullivan turned his childhood fascination with the ancient world into a unique educational experience that trades dusty textbooks for interactive experiences set in the Ice Age.
Over the years, Sullivan has taken his Mammoth Hunter presentation to schools, libraries and communities across the state for hundreds of live exhibits. Sullivan’s immersive presentations blend history, storytelling and tactile learning, as students accompany the Mammoth Hunter on a hunt and learn about the daily lives of our shared ancestors.
Growing up in the Madison area, Sullivan was instilled with a sense of history by his father, who studied ancient Rome and the medieval era. But from an early age, Sullivan was interested in even older times.
“I was the dinosaur kid, you know, the one who can tell you more about dinosaurs at age four than what he ate for breakfast,” he said. “I always had that kind of interest in the past. Through high school, though, my focus was on my interests, not on my homework. So my grades didn’t reflect that so well.”
After high school, Sullivan earned a culinary degree at Madison Area Technical College and eventually got a job in Wausau, where he worked in the restaurant industry for “a couple decades,” all while delving deeper into pre-historic studies in his free time.
“I spent a whole lot of time doing my own self-driven research and talking with archaeologists and folks who specialize in it and learning everything I can and improving everywhere I can,” Sullivan said.
But why the Stone Age? Especially for someone of Sullivan’s generation, who grew up seeing Stone Age people frequently depicted in cartoons and movies as primitive and dumb. Sullivan said when he discovered how incorrect that depiction was, and just how innovative our ancestors were, he was compelled to learn more and more.
“Our prehistoric ancestors really got a bad rap. I saw more and more new discoveries going further and further back about how really sophisticated and how impressive people were, and it just really drew me in,” he said. “Now I’m reading new articles every other week about how a date gets pushed back by some thousands of years, where people have now been on the North American continent for more than 20,000 years, where when I was graduating high school it was 13,000 years ago. It just every week it seems there’s a new discovery and it just makes it all the more fascinating.”
In 2018, Sullivan was naturally drawn to the Colossal Fossils Museum that opened at the Wausau Mall. The museum consisted of a 40-minute walkthrough tour featuring a mammoth skull (cast from a real mammoth fossil unearthed near Kenosha) and recreations of ancient weapons and tools. Among the replica collection was a specific throwing spear Sullivan was very familiar with.
“He [Dave Daniels, the owner] had one he made up for the program and it was a little crude – he knew what he was trying to make, but he hadn’t made a bunch of them, so he’d made a couple of beginner mistakes on it and I’d been making them for quite a while at that point,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan’s wife suggested he reach out to Daniels and offer to make a more accurate spear for the museum, as Sullivan had already made eight or nine at that point. Daniels was receptive to Sullivan’s offer and overjoyed when Sullivan returned with a variety of handmade pre-historic replicas. Daniels was so impressed with Sullivan’s knowledge that he asked him if he would like to lead a presentation at the museum.
“I did a presentation for the museum in February 2018, which kind of started the whole thing off,” Sullivan said. “When I came in for the presentation, I dressed up in the leather clothes that I was using for camping and that sort of thing, brought in the stone tools and the spear throwers and all that I’d been making for my own pursuit of interest and knowledge.”
This was an opportunity for Sullivan to put to use the tools and items he’d spent decades creating out of a passion. Sullivan was particularly well-suited to demonstrate these items in a natural way because, at times, he’d lived with the items in a matter not too dissimilar to our ancestors, from time to time.
As a kid, Sullivan frequently hunted, fished and trapped with his father. Later he started going on more extensive camping trips with his friends.
“We’d all go out camping on the Wisconsin River and stake out a sandbar for the weekend,” He said. “We’d find ourselves with like a 16-foot canoe just overflowing with all the gear that you need to go out in the woods and survive for three days, like the cooler, tents, the grill and everything else. It was an incredible pain to move all that stuff and deal with it, so, I got to thinking that there’s got to be a better way to do it and initially started looking into Native Americans and fur trade era as to how they went out into the wilderness for weeks or months or potentially years at a time.”
Sullivan started building his own gear, such as moccasins and leather clothes, and learning how to build a primitive fire from scratch.
“The more I got into it, the more I found my interest pulling me further back in time and just kind of landed in the Stone Age after a few years and kept it going as an interest but with a practical application,” he said.
Back in 2018, Sullivan brought that camping gear into the Colossal Fossil Museum for a one-off presentation that was supposed to last about one hour. Instead, nearly 200 people came to the presentation.
“I ended up talking with people for four-and-a-half, maybe five hours – until my voice was ready to give out,” he said.
Confined to a limited space at the museum, Sullivan started looking outside the museum walls and had the idea of bringing his unique presentation out to hungry learners. Soon enough, he found himself touring Wisconsin schools and museums with his mobile exhibit. When the pandemic hit, the museum was closed and Sullivan was forced to put his presentation on hold. The Mammoth Hunter re-emerged in 2022, however, with more bookings than ever before. While Sullivan cut back recently (due to the birth of his daughter), he would typically book 60 presentations a year. He anticipates returning to full time bookings this year.
“It’s quite a mind-bending thing when you can go in front of a group of kids and families and they’ve only seen this stuff on TV or in cartoons and here you’re showing them the real thing and they can realize it’s not just a cartoon,” he said. “It’s not some imaginary thing. Our shared ancestors used this stuff every day.”
Sullivan’s presentations are based on the concept of experiential archaeology, which combines the study of archaeology with hands-on work.
“You can learn a lot from actually using something that you just can’t figure out by looking at the artifact in a case,” he said. “I like to point out that at a really good archaeological site you’ll get about maybe 10% of what was actually going on there. The rest is blanks that you have to fill in. And that’s what my display is. It’s trying to fill in those blanks based on what we know and what we can tell from that little bit.”
A centerpiece of Sullivan’s program with kids is the Kenosha mammoth that lived about 14,800 years ago.
“It was taken down by some of the first people in the state,” he said. “We go through how you’re going to hunt a mammoth, why you’re going to hunt them in the fall, not the winter, the spring, or the summer. We go over the toolkit you’re going to need, how much help you’re going to need, how big the village is, where we’re coming from, and then we strike out into the landscape to start looking for a mammoth.”
Along the way, Sullivan and students will encounter other Ice Age animals.
“Once we get our mammoth down over by Kenosha, then we face off against some Ice Age predators. We’ve got a giant hawk, a dire wolf, a saber-tooth cat, an American lion and a short-faced bear,” he said.
Sullivan shares skull replicas of these animals with the kids, including the bear, whose skull is the size of a watermelon.
“We usually have a volunteer come up from the audience to put their head in the bear’s jaws because it’s got a big enough bite to just put a whole head in its mouth,” Sullivan said. “The kids always love that one. It’s a lot of fun.”
Following the hunting and defending experience, Sullivan guides the kids through the process of making a fire, cooking and preserving the meat for the entire village.
“Then we have a party and we play some music on replicas of pre-historic instruments, things like a bone flute, drums, a jawbone, things like that,” Sullivan said. “After that, we give the students a chance to ask questions and come up, take photographs. A good portion of the display can be hands-on.”
In addition to giving kids a high-impact, experiential learning program, Sullivan said the Mammoth Hunter presentation gives kids the opportunity to explore the roots that bind us all together.
“No matter who they are, no matter who their ancestors were or where they came from, this is our shared root, this is our shared ancestry,” he said. “This is literally how all of us got our start if you go back far enough. It doesn’t matter if you’re American, European, Asian, Australian, or African – it doesn’t matter. Everybody 5,000 years ago was using different versions of the same stuff. And that’s the stuff I’m talking about.”
Sullivan, who admitted he didn’t do great in school, said the program also introduces kids to constructive, educational hobbies – like his self-guided pre-historic studies. By understanding the past in a fun, experiential manner, Sullivan hopes to show kids that a classroom isn’t the only environment for learning, and that learning and schoolwork don’t have to be the same thing.
“Just because something doesn’t strike your fancy in school, doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring. There’s countless volumes of knowledge out there and all you have to do is a little hunting for it and you can find something fascinating,” he said. “The past is a part of all of us. It’s not some dusty thing in a book that you have to look at in fifth period because the teacher told you to open to page 105. It’s a real tangible thing. You can you can build it, you can touch it, you can use it. It’s still usable today. It’s applicable in the modern world even though the modern world’s kind of forgotten about it.”
Locally, Sullivan is regularly invited to John Muir Middle School and has held programs at Monk Gardens. Later this year, he also plans to host programs at the Marathon County Library. For more information, visit themammothhunter.com.
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