A History of Humans and Elephants

To understand how we as humans can relieve elephant suffering through better welfare and conservation practices, we must first ask: how do humans interact with elephants? How did we interact with elephants in the past?

The Pleistocene epoch

At the end of the Pleistocene Epoch (also known as the Ice Age), many proboscideans (the group of mammals that includes elephants, mammoths, and mastodons) experienced rapid extinction, with almost all proboscidean species becoming extinct [1]. Some scientists attribute the rapid extinctions of many proboscideans to climate change while some point to human hunting as a potential factor, due to the presence of human artifacts near fossils of proboscideans. However, the role of humans in hunting mammoths, mastodons, and potentially other proboscideans remains debated. By the Holocene Epoch, only two remaining proboscidean genera existed in great number: Elephas and Loxodonta [2]. The three major types of elephants today descend from these two genera: Elephas maximus (the Asian elephant), Loxodonta africana (the African savanna elephant), and

by Nicolo Villasis

Loxodonta cyclotis (the African forest elephant) [3].

Elephants and hunter-gatherers

At the beginning of recorded history, the African elephant ranged across sub-Saharan Africa while the Asian elephant ranges from Mesopotamia to China, across West, South, Southeast, and East Asia [4]. Hunter-gatherers likely hunted elephants for food as well as for their ivory, hide, and bone, but at a much smaller scale to the (possible) mass killings of mammoths and mastodons by humans. With the start of agriculture, elephants likely trampled crops, which were attractive as a food source. Crop depredation (the trampling of crops) has been a source of tension for humans and elephants ever since.

Asian elephants

Elephants were tamed in Asia four thousand years ago [5]. The earliest records show that the Indus Valley civilization had captive or even tamed elephants, as soapstone seals of elephants wearing cloth have been found. The Aryans, a group of people that followed the Indus Valley society, attested to elephant ownership as a symbol of wealth in the Vedas, a collection of religious poems and

hymns. Both deities and people were depicted as riding elephants and using them for labor and battle. Elephants were hunted for sport by this time. By the fourth century B.C.E., armies were said to have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of war elephants [6]. For societies to have accrued this many war elephants, rulers must have had established systems for managing both captive elephants as well as wild elephant populations. Later religious texts in the third century B.C.E. describe the training and care of war elephants as well as the distribution of wild elephants, indicating the importance of elephants to society in India.

Within India, elephants seemed to only be rarely consumed by the time of the Indus Valley civilization and rarely if at all by the time of the Aryans. A taboo on the killing and consuming of elephants may have formed due to the demand for elephants for war [7]. Elephants’ usefulness in battle and as draft animals as well as their tendency to sometimes trample crops may have resulted in humans conferring religious respect onto elephants, seeing elephants and elephant-shaped deities like Ganesha as requiring appeasement and worship.

African elephants

As for African elephants, they were likely hunted and possibly captured in Ancient Egypt, as hinted at by rock drawings from the third millennium B.C.E. [8]. Egyptian rulers hunted elephants, mainly seeking them for their ivory, but they may have been able to obtain ivory from Asia as well. By 400 B.C.E., the use of African elephants for war seemed to take hold, and worship of elephants in upper Egypt seems to have occurred. Elephants were used in various wars under the Seleucid Persians, Ptolemaic Egyptians, the Carthaginians, and other peoples. The Romans did not seem to use war elephants as extensively as other societies but did use elephants for entertainment in circuses, public processions, victory parades, and animal fights, where elephants fought against men in arenas. However, the capture of African elephants in large scale died out by 300 C.E. whereas the capture and use of elephants in Asia continued for much longer.

While some practices such as the use of elephants in war have died out by now, humans today still contend with various mentioned issues surrounding elephants such as elephant crop depredation, the use of elephants in entertainment, hunting, and the use of elephants for labor. A history of how humans interacted with elephants in the past serves to contextualize how humans impact elephants and vice versa in the current day.