human hunters. It makes sense: killing one of these enormous beasts would provide a huge amount of meat for a hunter-gatherer family, which made the effort and risk of hunting them worthwhile. But, as prehistoric cave art depicting them shows, mammoths provided more than simply meat. Ivory is a much better material than deer antler for making the spear and arrow points needed for big-game hunting, so the ivory of slain mammoths was used to hunt more effectively and kill even more mammoths and other megafauna.
Climate change almost certainly played some role in driving a number of extinctions, but this is increasingly believed to be a secondary factor in the collapse of large mammals. South America suffered some of the greatest losses, yet the climate there was far more stable than in Africa, which experienced comparatively few megafauna extinctions over the same period.
Many of the large herbivore species that went extinct were generalist foragers, who could eat grass or browse for food depending on availability. All the evidence suggests that there were still plentiful foraging opportunities, and some species, such as the American mastodon, went extinct even though their preferred plant species have remained abundant up until present day. The only viable culprit for these mass extinctions appears to be the human race.
Human pressure on animal populations. Man’s desire for ivory. Climate change. This all sounds eerily familiar. We – or at least our ancestors – have to hold up our hands for the dramatic decline in the number of proboscidean species existing in the world, a decline that continues, and now encompasses the remaining members of that family.
One thing that can help us to understand elephants better is having an idea of where they lived and how far they ventured – their range and spread. It is difficult to know the exact prehistoric ranges of elephants, but we do know that the ancestors of both the African (Loxodonta) and Asian (Elephas) species lived together in Africa for a very long time.
Even after the latter species spread out of Africa into the Middle East and across Asia, some stayed behind until as recently as 11,000 years ago.
Understanding the movement of elephants over the last few thousand years is a challenge, but we can use rock art – like those etchings found in Libya and Sudan – and descriptions from ancient texts to give us some clues. From these historic sources, one thing is readily apparent: until very recently, elephants roamed over most of the African continent, all the way from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the beaches of South Africa.
They spread from the jungles of Senegal in the west, to the highlands of Ethiopia in the east. They inhabited every kind of African environment, from the arid deserts of Namibia and the fringes of the Sahara, all the way up to the treelines of Africa’s great peaks. Savannah elephants wandered the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Rwenzoris, while their forest cousins bathed in the Congo river.
Aristotle spoke of elephants wandering the Atlas Mountains near the Strait of Gibraltar in modern-day Morocco, and Pliny the Elder reported that herds of elephants ‘infested’ parts of modern-day Libya and Algeria. But by around AD 500, there were no wild elephants living in Mediterranean north Africa.
It has been predicted that up until the sixteenth century – before European exploration, exploitation and colonisation really took hold – there could have been more than twenty million elephants in Africa. This staggering figure is an estimate, based on our understanding of how much space was available for elephants, and how many elephants each of these areas could have supported, given the vegetation they likely contained.
What is certain is that from the moment Europeans arrived, the number of elephants in Africa began to shrink. Decline was slow at first, but the causes for that decline500 years ago are essentially the same as those today – namely hunting for ivory, and habitat loss due to agriculture.
From the sixteenth century onwards, Europeans introduced new crops to Africa, such as maize and sweet potato, which were grown on land newly claimed for agriculture. Elephants would have been using those same areas as natural feeding grounds before they were turned into farms. This increased the number of encounters between humans and elephants, which would have quickly turned ugly if the elephant was intent on sampling the new food source that had suddenly appeared in their stomping ground.
But as well as crops, Europeans also brought guns. And with them, a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory that would change things forever. These European colonisers were not the first to covet and value ivory, though. Long before history was recorded, Stone Age Europeans used mammoth ivory to carve figurines, toys and religious idols. Tomb inscriptions show that Ancient Egyptians had been collecting tusks since at least 2000 BC, and Tutankhamun’s tomb of 1325 BC was full of ivory trinkets. The Ancient Greeks also discussed the use and beauty of ‘the white gold’, long before any of them had seen an elephant’s tusk.
The Romans used far more ivory than the Greeks or Egyptians before them, and even in the British Isles, Anglo-Saxon women were buried with ivory accessories. But the procurement of ivory in these ancient times, although a highly valuable trade, was not occurring fast enough to dent the millions-strong elephant population at the time.
Commercial ivory trading really took off in the sixteenth century, at the same time as the spread of agriculture in Africa. This loss of habitat and increase in unnatural deaths had a catastrophic impact on the ranges and behaviour of elephants, and by causing local population declines, made any other losses far harder to recover from.
People didn’t only interact with elephants to steal their teeth, of course, and historic accounts show that our fascination with the live animal is not a new phenomenon. The size and strength of elephants has always been a source of wonder for us, and perhaps it is indicative of human nature that it’s something we have always tried to exploit.
We know that elephants have been caught, broken and tamed for use from as early as 3000 BC in India and 1500 BC in Syria. Having encountered them in battles in India, Alexander the Great began using Asian elephants around 330 BC like an ancient precursor to the battle tank, and Ptolemy II – the king of Egypt and Carthage – was the first to capture African elephants for use in war. Ptolemy III apparently had an army of around 300 African elephants by 240 BC.
Most famously, Hannibal used a herd of forty African elephants during his invasion of Italy by way of Spain in 218 BC. Three had died before they even reached the Alps, and the remaining thirty-seven were used mainly as pack animals, although they did join in the combat against the Roman cavalry. In the end, all but one died of cold or starvation; and the fate of the last is unclear. Hannibal did use elephants again in a few subsequent battles, until it was made part of his peace terms with the Romans that he surrendered all his elephants and agreed that he wouldn’t train any more.
The main advantage of using elephants in war was the sheer intimidation factor – it must have been truly terrifying to see these giant monsters charging towards you across the battlefield at speeds of 25 mph, particularly when they were in large numbers, covered in armour with a turret on top. Even battle-hardened Roman soldiers were known to rout under such an onslaught. However, it’s important not to forget that the sights and sounds of battle must have been equally terrifying for the elephants themselves, and if they were wounded or panicked by the enemy, they could end up running amok, trampling men and horses within their own lines.
In fact, because of this risk, elephant riders often carried a large mallet and chisel-shaped tool, which was used to kill the animal if it went berserk and became uncontrollable. Experienced enemy soldiers also learned over time to target the elephants at the outset of the battle – to fire their arrows and direct their lances towards the poor animal’s sensitive trunk – in order to make them panic and flee back into their own ranks.
Perhaps because of their unpredictability, Julius Caesar didn’t rate the use of elephants in battle, so few African elephants ended up being used in European wars after 47 BC. That said, they are still classed as a pack animal in a US Special Forces field manual issued as recently as 2004! The last supposed use of elephants in war occurred in 1987, when Iraq was alleged to have used some to transport heavy weaponry for use in Kirkuk during the Iran–Iraq war.
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