The onomatopoetic Mongol word for the animal elephant, zaan, reflects the primordial Eurasian word for the trumpeting animal mammoth. Subsequently it had diversified into the many variants such as słəŋ, siaŋ, sioŋ, saŋ, chaŋ, slon, silonit, glan, zilonis, zihon, zo, masan, tsonoqua and many other local forms. The endings and are characteristic for Europe, whereas <ŋ> is characteristic for East Asia. Exceptions to this continuum are the Cambodian (Khmer) word damri and the Lithuanian (Baltic) word dramblys. DNA Genealogy and geophysical data indicate that about 68,000 years ago the people having the Y Chromosome haplogroups A00, A0, A1a, A1b1, and B survived on the East African highlands and spread later across Africa, whereas in the area of Alps and Balkans in Europe there survived the people having the Y Chromosome haplogroups BT and CT, whose descendants subsequenly split into the Y Chromosome haplogroups C through T, which in time spread all over the world. This may be the source of the observed similarities.

Genetics, linguistics, mythology, art, anthropology and other disciplines converge to remind modern humans that much of their belief system harkens back to the hunters of mammoths and related giant fauna. This is manifest in the fact that all across Eurasia the words for the animal elephant are remarkably similar and are ostensibly derived from the onomatopoeic "ZZZAAAN" sound of mammoth trumpeting. In places where memory about mammoths and elephants no longer survives it is perpetuated in mythologies about giants who suck. These beings are described as being wooly, pachyderm, nasal, gigantic, and in other ways remarkably mammoth-like.

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