A Tale of Two Elephants

In early December 1695, a group of workmen were excavating some fine white sand from a quarry between the villages of Burgtonna and Gräfentonna, in Thuringia. The sand was valuable in a number of crafts, including filling hourglasses, so the workers were careful in their excavations. You probably know what happened next. They uncovered “some awful big bones” and sent word to the castle to find out what to do with them. Luckily for us, the lord of the land, Duke Fredrick II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was an enlightened despot who was both a patron of the arts and sciences and an avid collector. More than simply ordering the workmen to save the bones for his collections, he had them leave the bones in place and slowly uncover them. This modern style excavation would be an under-appreciated milestone in the development of paleontology.

What the diggers discovered that day were a pair of feet and lower legs pointing northward. The feet had five toes and short ankle bones. The spectators thought they looked more like human feet than any animal they knew. At that point, the weather turned nasty and the excavation was halted until after the new year. In January, the work resumed. Over a period of about two weeks, they uncovered the upper legs, pelvis, a complete vertebral column with ribs, the upper limbs with five digit hands or feet, and... a “hideous head” unlike anything anyone had ever seen. To one side of the top of the skull were two enormous, curved pieces of what appeared to be ivory. With the entire skeleton nicely uncovered, the Duke made a special trip from Gotha on January 23 to view it, bringing along a large retinue that included a number of doctors from the university and his personal librarian.

The doctors, led by Johann Christoph Schnetter, and the librarian, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, all had a good laugh over the silly peasants who had thought the bones were those of a giant. Although that would have been preferred explanation of many educated men earlier in the century, very few still believed that there had ever been giants other than the few individuals named in the Bible. While the doctors and Tentzel agreed on what the bones were not, they passionately disagreed about what they were. Schnetter and the doctors believed they were the natural formations that merely looked like bones while Tentzel believed that they were the remains of a real elephant. Duke Fredrick chose not to take sides. He ordered the doctors and Tentzel to each submit a brief summarizing their arguments.

Today, most people would look at the bones and say "any idiot can see that those are fossils of some kind of elephant." Most would probably pick a mammoth for that type of elephant. But, in the Seventeenth Century, idiots and educated alike had only the vaguest idea what an elephant looked like and even less idea what its skeleton looked like. The educated were aware that the lack of data for comparative anatomy was a problem, but there was nothing they could do about it. There weren't enough elephants to go around.

Between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, we have records of exactly two elephants appearing in European Christendom. One belonged to Charlemagne and the other to Henry III of England. This began to change during the Sixteenth Century. After the Portuguese reached India by going around Africa, they began bringing back elephants that various Indian kings sent as gifts to their king. Manuel I sent one of those elephants named Hanno to Pope Leo X. The elephant died soon after. When Leo died he was buried with his elephant. The Portuguese kings sent least four others to their fellow monarchs during that century. In the Seventeenth Century, elephants were still rare, but the owners began sending them on tours, both to show off their wealth and to educate the population. Two elephants in particular influenced the debate between the doctors and Tentzel.

The first was named Hansken. After the Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese out of the India trade, one of their agents acquired a young female elephant in Ceylon in 1637. Once in Europe, her owners taught her some tricks and and sent her on a tour of the continent where she performed before audiences in an approximation of modern circus acts. After eighteen years on the road, she injured her foot in Italy, developed an infection, and died in Florence on November 9, 1655. A special mass was written for her. Grand Duke Ferdinando II was obsessed with the new sciences and had most of the good parts of Hansken removed before burying her. He had the skeleton mounted as accurately as possible and had her skin stuffed with straw for his collection.

Hansken, by Rembrandt. The British Museum.

There is no name recorded for the second elephant. In June of 1681, a showman named Wilkins brought an elephant to Dublin, Ireland and set up a booth near the Custom House to show it. Early on the morning of Friday the seventeenth, the booth caught fire and the poor creature was killed before Wilkins could bring it to safety. Wilkins realized there was still money to be made from his elephant if he could salvage the skeleton and continue his tour displaying it. He arranged for a troop of musketeers to be sent over to guard the corpse from souvenir seekers while he set out to hire as many butchers as he could to clean the bones before the smell became a public nuisance.

Late in the day, a doctor named Alan Mullen heard about the elephant and rushed over to negotiate with Wilkins. Mullen wanted to have an orderly dissection with artists ready to make renderings of each part. Wilkins was willing to let Mullen direct the work of the butchers, but insisted they finish it in one day and dispose of the smelly parts before Sunday when they would not be allowed to work. Mullen ordered the butchers to start working immediately. They worked through the night and through Saturday, completing the work before the Sunday deadline.

Mullen wrote up descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s parts and sent an account to Will Petty of the Royal Philosophical Society in London. His examination was far superior to anything that been published in Europe (in India, veterinary treatises on elephants had been available for centuries). Petty had Mullen’s letter published as a pamphlet. In the forty-two pages Mullen describes all of the major organs and some of the muscle groups, but gives surprising little space to the bones. This lack is made for by a trifold diagram of the reconstructed skeleton, which Wilkins had managed to assemble and take back on the road, and a separate drawing of the skull.

Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

The Gotha doctors' belief that the bones were natural mineral occurrences and not organic remains was a peculiarly European idea. In most of the rest of the world, people had very little problem believing that unfamiliar old bones, even petrified and damaged ones, were organic remains. Renaissance Europeans had a tradition, derived from Neoplatonic philosophy, of a certain "power" in nature that allowed spontaneous generation. Things might grow based on no visible cause. Flies grow from poop, small pebbles appear in peoples' kidneys, Scottish geese grow out of driftwood, and, as even we moderns know, a crop of rocks grows in our gardens every winter. Another tradition, derived from a number of philosophic sources, held that certain other "powers" could give shape to growing things. This is why a piece of agate might have a landscape in it, another might have an image of the Virgin Mother in it, and other stones might be shaped like bones.

The doctors organized their arguments, Schnetter wrote them up, and they had them published and distributed to great thinkers around Europe by St. Valentine's day. The entire pamphlet is seven pages long and a sizable chunk of it is dedicated to describing the discovery. They spend very little space laying out the argument itself. They assume that most of their audience is already familiar with the basic elements of it. The largest part of the pamphlet is dedicated to citing contemporary thinkers who might agree with them. Between these two parts, they make a preemptive strike against Tentzel by explaining why the supposed bones could not be an elephant. One point is that, while the bones are not scattered, they are somewhat disarticulated. Each bone is separated from the next by at least the thickness of a hand. A second point is that the tusks appear to be hollow, not solid ivory. What appears to be the most damning point is that the skull looks nothing like an elephant. Why are the tusks up by the eyes and not by the mouth where everyone knows they should be?

Tentzel wrote a short response, which he submitted directly to the Duke (it still exists in the Gotha archives, but I haven't seen it). He took more time writing a full statement of his case and, by taking more time, was able to prepare a full rebuttal to the doctor's argument. He had a special advantage in preparing his case. As curator of the Duke' collections, he had access to fossils and other curiosities that he could compare with the bones. He had the bones themselves; the Duke had had him collect as many of the remains as he could. By taking more time he was able to interview the diggers and other witnesses to excavation. And he had Mullen's pamphlet with its detailed drawings of the skeleton and skull.

Tentzel's public presentation appeared in the April issue of a journal that he wrote every month called Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern (Monthly Conversations between Good Friends about All Kinds of Books). It runs 108 pages with an illustration of the skull. After a detailed description of the discovery, the fictional friends of the title take sides. Caecilius and Passagirer take Tentzel's position and Aurelius and Didius defend the doctors”. Naturally, most of the space is given to the former.

Tentzel's skull. Monatliche Unterredungen... April 1696.

Mullen's pamphlet is liberally quoted to show that the Tonna bones have the same proportions as the Dublin ones. Tentzel admits that there is a problem here; his elephant is twice as big as the Dublin one. He has an answer to that problem. Among the observers he interviewed was a Dutch sailor who had spent many years in India. The sailor informed him that elephants keep growing. By the size of the tusks, he estimated that the Tonna elephant must have been at least 200 years old. Caecilius and Passagirer describe many other recent discoveries of large bones and ivory described by reputable witnesses. When Aurelius and Didius get their turn, to Tentzel's credit, they give an accurate summary of the doctor's position rather than a parody of it. They still lose the debate.

Along with his summary of Mullen's pamphlet, Tentzel mentions Hansken and says he is writing to some illustrious colleagues in Italy to get accurate measurements of it. In July, he published a long letter in Latin to Antonio Magliabechi, the personal librarian to Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, the brother of Grand Duke Ferdinando. Magliabechi was one of the major figures of the Republic of Letters during that generation and widely renowned for his disgusting personal hygiene. In his letter, Tentzel repeated most what he had written in Monatliche Unterredungen, leaving out the literary floutishes and defense of the doctors' position. Magliabechi and his Italian peers enthusiastically endorsed Tentzel's conclusions and sent the detailed information he requested. Italian scholars, as opposed to those north of the Alps, had no trouble accepting the presence of elephants on their lands. First, there were the war elephants of Pyrrus and Hannibal. Later, there were the many elephants brought by the Romans to be slaughtered in the circuses for entertainment. Magliabechi and several others wrote their own pamphlets and letters to journals.

As Northwestern Europeans began to accept the presence of elephants on their lands, the discoveries of Italian scholars were frequently cited to make the idea easier to accept. However, in the long run this delayed the acceptance of the idea of other, extinct, elephant-like species. Tentzel had his own cautious approach to the responses of his Italian correspondents. He was glad to have their endorsement for his conclusion that the remains were elephantine in nature. However, he distanced himself from the idea that the remains came from historical times. In his Monatliche Unterredungen, piece, he had Caecilius and Passagirer carefully go over various historical arguments and reject them. This could not be Charlemagne's elephant because it died in Northern Germany. This could not have been an elephant of Attila's because he moved to fast to have used elephants. It could not have belonged to some unknown merchant or returning crusader because no one would have abandoned something as valuable as the tusks. The very location of the tusks argued against human agency. Tentzel pointed out that the clear layering of strata above the remains showed that the ground had never been disrupted by human action.

Tentzel's arguments appear quite modern up to this point. His conclusion will appear less so to most contemporary readers. Tentzel was quite firm in arguing that the position of the remains was proof of the Noachian Deluge. This was a special interest of his ans a topic he regularly returned to in Monatliche Unterredungen. It's possible that his main interest in the boned was that he saw them as proof of the Deluge. To him, the northward orientation of the skeleton showed that it had drifted up from the south. The neat layering of the strata above it was the sort of deposition he expected from the receding flood waters.

Tentzel's argument that the bones were the actual organic remains of an elephant had an additional strength. As scientific communication moved from letters, however widely distributed, to printed journals, with much wider distribution, illustrations became much more important and accurate. Perhaps the most important parts of Mullen's pamphlet were the illustrations. Only a small number of living scholars had seen a live elephant and only a very tiny number had seen a skeleton. Tentzel took very conscious advantage of the importance of Mullen's skull illustration.

The skull of Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

It took me a few looks to understand this illustration. Why do the tusks look so short compared to the profile? What's with that little hook at the end? I went back to my sources on elephant dentition (it's a surprisingly complex topic. Some day I'll write about it. I'm not sure how much the book needs). My first thought was that it was the tusk core, but that's soft tissue, not bone and, in any case, it doesn't have that hook at the end. Then it occurred to me, we're looking at the tusks from the tips. Most illustrations would tilt the skull to emphasize their length. Mullen already showed their length in the full skeleton profile. The tusks curve forward from the skull. A front-on view of the skull dramatically reduces the apparent length of the tusks.

Tentzel's illustration shows the same apparent shortness. By his own measurements, the tusks should be longer that the skull. To emphasize the similarity with Mullen's illustration, he portrayed his skull with the same orientation. It lacked the drama that tipping the skull forward and showing of the tusks would have had, but it strengthened his larger argument that the Tonna remains were those of an elephant.

The majority of scholars agreed with Tentzel about the remains being elephants though a significant minority sided with a doctors. A small minority still held out for giants. The great majority also agreed about the Deluge being the cause of their deposition, though a small number had begun to doubt the historical reality of a global flood. It would be another century before they became a narrow majority.

The Tonna elephant would be cited by proto-paleontologists for decades but their significance would evolve over time. At first they were nothing more than an argument for the organic nature of fossils. Later, as the debate over mammoths developed, they would become an argument for the idea that elephants had once lived far north of the tropics. Next, they would be cited as a mammoth, rather than an elephant.

The remains are probably gone now. If any parts are still in the Gotha collections, they are no longer identified as such. That doesn't mean we can't identify the species. In recent years, paleontologists have returned to the Tonna quarries and worked the layer of white sand. They have dated it to the late Eemian, the warmest period before the last ice age. The most common proboscidean in that strata is the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). This species was first identified in 1847. It had a fairly wide range across Europe. Some of them wandered into Sicily when the seas were low during the glacial maxima. There, constrained by the limited resources of an island, they underwent a process of dwarfing, eventually becoming Elephas mnaidriensis, the cyclops skeletons I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Tentzel only published Monatliche Unterredungen for one more year after his treatment of the Tonna remains. The following January, he wrote a shorter piece quoting the responses he had received from Italy. At the turn of the century, he moved on to a new job with King of Saxony and briefly published a new journal. During that time a second skeleton was found at Tonna and he and Schnetter went at it one more time, but neither added anything new to their arguments. The job with the King of Saxony didn't work out and Tentzel died in poverty. Despite his relevance during the next century, he has largely been relegated to footnote status since. This appears to changing. He's had some attention lately for his role as a science communicator. I'm doing my best to see that he gets some attention for his science as well.

The Periodic Table of the Elephants

Last January, Brian Switek, a rising star in the dinosaur firmament (his latest book), made an offhand comment about the need for a periodic table of the elephants. I don't know if he meant it seriously or if he was just going for the pun. However, I had just been reading about proboscidean evolution and the name set off a whole marquee of light bulbs over my head. Let's make a periodic table of proboscidean evolution.

I Googled the idea and found several "Periodic Tables of the Elephants" but all of them were normal periodic tables using cartoon elephants as illustrations. None of them were really about elephants. I let the idea bubble for a while, bounced it off my Facebook friends, and, last week, decided to go for it.

So, what is the plan? Simply put, it's an educational poster of proboscidean evolution using the familiar theme of the periodic table to illustrate the diversity of the proboscidean family tree. It's a very bushy tree. The definitive work in the late 1930s listed 350 species. It took sixty years for someone to become brave enough to prune that tree, getting rid of unnecessary duplications, and adding recent discoveries. By my count, there are currently 177 species recognized in the order Proboscidea. This can't all be explained in a poster. No one wants a poster of mostly words. The poster needs an accompanying booklet. This book and poster set is not unusual for educational posters.

Alrighty. What's the plan? For the periodic table itself, I intend to organize a representative subgroup of the recognized species (about a third of them) in the order that their genera first appeared in the fossil record and use these for the table. For each square in the table, I'll make a drawing of the species with a size bar, give it a two letter symbol, provide its Linnean binomial (scientific name), and the namer and year it was named (these are also part of the full scientific name). In the center of the poster I'll provide a key to the squares and on one side I'll provide a general family tree of to show how they fit together.

But wait, that's not all. The booklet expands on this. In the booklet I'll provide a specific description of each species, with an enlarged illustration, explaining it's evolutionary significance and stories about it's discovery, lifestyle, and appearance. The whole thing will be prefaced with an illustrated article on proboscidean evolution that gives perspective to each of the individual genera and species. Aside from its educational value, the booklet will allow the owner to assume an air of superiority while explaining the poster to their students/nerdy friends. Who doesn't like that?

I've decided to pitch this on Kickstarter (or Indiegogo, I'm open to recommendations). I'm broke and I need some income to keep going. I have tons of research that doesn't fit into the book, and I would like to monetize it. This also gives me something to put on my resume to convince potential publishers that I know my stuff. There are some great stories that I had to greatly abridge or cut from the book. These will make great e-books, but these are things that will be useful for marketing the mammoth book after it's done. I need something that I can do right away that will pay up front. The evolutionary data fits the ticket perfectly.

To do this, I'll need to produce around eighty professional quality illustrations. I can do that, but, since the last time I did any serious illustration, I've developed a serious hand tremor. Retraining myself will take some work, but not a lot. I would show you my current artistic ability, but my scanner died not long before I moved. Getting a new one will bee my first expense. I need to pay myself for my research time, my art, layout, color, and the production of the first batch of the posters, booklets, associated mailing costs, and anything I might have missed. Based on what I've already done, I think three months for the project is a realistic goal.

This leads me to some questions: 1) Is this a good idea? 2) Would you buy the poster or do you know anyone who would? 3) If I go ahead with this, what should be my financial goal? I think at least $4000 for the art and at least $2000 for the rest. Could I get more? 4) I need to offer threshold gifts. Any ideas? Signed prints? The poster? 5) What am I forgetting?

I'll keep working on the book during this time, just not as fast. If anyone has experience with Kickstarter projects, I'd love to hear about it. What do you think?

The Elephants of Raphia and Gash-Barka

Writing seventy years after the fact, this is how Polybius described the Battle of Raphia between the Egyptian armies of Ptolemy IV and the Selucid (Persian) armies of Antiochus III in 217 BCE:

When Ptolemy and his sister after their progress had reached the extremity of his left wing and Antiochus with his horse-guards had reached his extreme right, they gave the signal for battle and brought the elephants first into action. A few only of Ptolemy's elephants ventured to close with those of the enemy, and now the men in the towers on the back of these beasts made a gallant fight of it, striking with their pikes at close quarters and wounding each other, while the elephants themselves fought still better, putting forth their whole strength and meeting forehead to forehead. ... Most of Ptolemy's elephants, however, declined the combat, as is the habit of African elephants; for unable to stand the smell and the trumpeting of the Indian elephants, and terrified, I suppose, also by their great size and strength, they at once turn tail and take to flight before they get near them. This is what happened on the present occasion; and when Ptolemy's elephants were thus thrown into confusion and driven back on their own lines, Ptolemy's guard gave way under the pressure of the animals.

Ptolemy's guard recovered and went on to win the battle without his elephants. Polybius credits the victory to Ptolemy being able to give better motivational speeches than Antiochus.

Aside from its strategic and geopolitical importance, the Battle of Raphia has attracted the attention of historians and natural historians for twenty-two centuries because it is the only recorded instance of African and Asian elephants facing each other in battle. Considering the fact that African elephants are usually regarded as untamable, it is one of the only recorded instances of African elephants being used in battle, period.

Polybius' statement that the African elephants were terrified by the "great size and strength" of the Asian elephants took on a life of its own. For the next twenty centuries, it was accepted wisdom among educated Europeans that Asian elephants are larger than African elephants. For most African and Asian elephants, this is not true. The average African elephant is much larger than the average Asian elephant. The exception to this rule is the African forest elephant which only recently was recognized as a third species. This species is much smaller than the African savanna elephant and slightly smaller than the Asian.

How this belief persisted if a fairly easy question to answer. During the heyday of the Roman Empire, virtually all of the elephants they saw were Asian elephants. No one had a chance to make side-by-side comparisons. After the fall of the Western Empire, very few elephants made it to Europe at all. The handful that did (admittedly a very large hand), were all Asian elephants. By the end of the Middle Ages, Europeans lacked accurate images even of Asian elephants. This began to change after 1500 with the establishment of direct trade between Western Europe and Southern Asia around the tip of Africa. Within a few years of the opening of that trade, the king of Portugal had enough elephants that he could make gifts of them to the Pope and the Hapsburg emperor. In the second half of the Seventeenth Century, enough Asian elephants had been brought to Europe that non-royals owned them an traveled the countryside showing them to commoners. Dutch merchants, stopping at the Cape of Good Hope on their way to and from Asia were the first to view both kinds of elephants and make comparisons that questioned Polybius. In 1797, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described enough differences between the two types of elephant, especially in their teeth, that he declared them to be different species.

For students of the classics, Blumenbach's identification created a problem. The Cape elephant, on which he based his conclusions, is much larger than any Asian elephant. A possible solution to their problem wasn't long in coming. As Europeans penetrated deeper into Africa, reports began to emerge of a much smaller elephant in the dense central African forests. In 1900, Paul Matschie, a zoologist from Berlin, identified four subspecies of African elephant, with the Cape elephant being the largest and the Central African forest elephant being the smallest. Matschie's samples for his forest elephant were from Cameroon, then a German colony. A few years later, Theodore Noack, based on the study of a zoo elephant in Hanover, identified a pygmy species of elephant from the same area as Matschie's forest elephant. Finally, in 1908, Richard Lydekker, of the British Royal Society, divided African elephants into thirteen sub-species incorporating all four of Matschie's sub-species as well as Noack's pygmy elephant. By the mid Twentieth Century, all of the sub-species were merged back into one species, Loxodonta africana.

Before that could happen, classicists seized the forest elephant as the solution to the Polybius problem. In a series of papers published in the forties and fifties, William Gowers and Howard Scullard argued that the elephants of Ptolemy must have been forest elephants. They further argued that forest elephants at the time inhabited a range that included all of North Africa from Morocco to Ethiopia. This interpretation has also been adopted by military historians, who use the hypothetical population of North African forest elephants to explain the source of Hannibal's famous elephants. Among historians and war gamers, the existence of the North African forest elephant has attained the same level of accepted wisdom as African-elephants-are-smaller-than-Asian-elephants had in the Middle Ages. Yet, I'm aware of no evidence that this is true.

That's not to say there were no elephants in North Africa. Around the year 500 BCE, a Carthaginian named Hanno took a fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the coast of Africa. Halfway down the coast of modern Morocco, he put ashore and commented on the presence of large numbers of elephants. The elephants were part of a population that inhabited the Atlas Mountains, which stretch from the Atlantic across Morocco and northern Algeria. This population was the source of at least part of Hannibal's elephants and continued to exist for at least a century after his time. But were they savanna elephants or forest elephants? Is that even a meaningful distinction?

It turns out, the answer is yes. Though most taxonomies no longer split African elephants into different sub-species after 1960, question still lingered about the forest elephant. The elephants had distinct physical features other than size that distinguished them from other African elephants. Was this no more significant that hair and skin color among humans or did the differences run deeper? With the rise of genetic sequencing technology at the turn of the century it finally became possible to produce a definitive answer. Beginning in 2000, a number of tests showed that the differences were great enough to label the forest elephant an entirely separate species. Hybridization between forest elephants and savanna elephants is possible, but rare. The name chosen for the forest elephant is Loxodonta cyclotis and credit for defining it is given to Matschie's 1900 paper. The genetic sequencing of the forest elephant makes it possible to make a provisional determination about the identity of Hannibal's and Ptolemy's elephants.

As for Hannibal's elephants, no one has done the study yet. Since the Atlas Mountains elephant herds have been extinct for two thousand years, this would require locating some bones and dating them to Hannibal's time. Even when the tests were done, it wouldn't produce a definite answer. While he probably used Atlas elephants for most of those he took on his invasion, it is possible that at least some of them were Asian elephants. His personal elephant was called Sarus, a word that has been translated as possibly meaning "the Syrian" (it could also mean "one tusk" or "Mr. Snuggles" (I made that last one up)).

We're on firmer ground with Ptolemy's elephants. Polybius specifically says they were African elephants, distinguishing them from Antiochus' Asian elephants. We have a second line of evidence to back this up. During Alexander the Great's campaigns in the East, the Greeks came to appreciate the value of War elephants. After his death, his generals and successors, each with their own chunk of the empire, tried to acquire elephants for their armies. Although Ptolemy I gained one of the choicer and easier defended parts of the empire, Egypt, he was cut of from the source of war elephants and was unable to breed his own herd (he likely had no females). According to an insciption found at Adoulis on the Eritrean coast, Ptolemy III bragged that "Troglodytic and Ethiopian elephants, which he and his father were the first to hunt from these lands and, [brought] them back into Egypt, to fit out for military service." Although the geographic term Ethiopia was used to mean all of Black Africa, in this case, it's safe to assume that it meant the the region of Adoulis which was then part of the Kingdom of Axum. Luckily, elephants still exist in the region.

In a place called Gash-Barka, near where the borders of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan come together, a small herd of about 120 elephants has survived. Between 2001 and 2003, a group of scientists collected poop as part of a larger research project into the Gash-Barka herd. One of the leaders of the team was Jeheskel Shoshani who had been one of the primaries on the team that first sequenced forest elephant DNA. Naturally, the team also sequenced DNA of the Gash-Barka elephants recovered from their poop. The results were conclusive: "At every one of the diagnostic sites, savanna elephant-specific nucleotide character states were present; sequences with sites that matched a character state typical of forest elephants were never found." The Gash-Barka elephants are savanna elephants. Furthermore, the Gash-Barka closest affinity was to East African savanna elephants, which are less likely to contain any hybrids than the other group tested, West Central African elephants.

In the discussion section of their paper, the researchers look at the implications for Polybius' account of the Battle of Raphia. The Adoulis inscription only mentions African elephants as the source for the war elephants for Ptolemy IV's father. There is no reason to believe he had replaced them with new, smaller elephants from another source. If the Egyptian elephants were as big, if not bigger, than the Selucid ones, something other than size must have caused them to run away. Maybe they weren't as well trained or experienced as the Selucid elephants. Maybe the Selucid troops knew some trick for fighting elephants that the Egyptians didn't know. Pliny wrote that one of the only things elephants fear is mice. Maybe the Selucids had a battalion of trained combat mice (probably not). Maybe it was just one of those things that happen when armies clash.

There is one final possibility to consider. At the time, there existed a herd of Asian elephants native to Syria. The bones of these elephants show them to have been the largest of Asian elephants. Within a century they would be hunted to extinction for their impressive ivory. Most surviving records of war elephants describe them as having come from India already trained. Quite a few generations passed before Mediterranean kingdoms were able to breed and train their own herds of war elephants. It is remotely possible that Antiochus' elephant handlers had managed to capture and train some Syrian elephants. If Ptolemy's elephants were bigger than average Indian elephants, the use of Syrian elephants raises the possibility that Antiochus' elephants could have matched them in size.

The Gash-Barka study puts to rest one part of the theory of the North African forest elephant. Elephants in Northeast Africa today are, and almost certainly in antiquity were, savanna elephants. In Northwest Africa, the species used as war elephants remains in question. But, it's a question that can potentially be answered in the near future. The study also shows how fields of science, supposedly far removed from the humanities, can find unexpected relevance there.

In its way, this is an argument for a traditional liberal arts education. If genetics was taught as nothing more than a vocational skill, it would have been far less likely that anyone on the Gash-Barka team would have made the connection between their project and the writings of a second century BCE historian. A liberal arts education brings remote fields of knowledge together and makes them all relevant to the human experience. Who could have said in advance that collecting a few piles of elephant poop would produce knowledge relevant to genetics, conservation, history, and the classics? I'm a strong believer that no knowledge is ever completely useless. I hope this advances my case.

Afterward: The Gash-Barka genetics study in the current issue of the Journal of Heredity is the fifth report on that project. In May 2008, Jeheskel Shoshani was killed in a terrorist bombing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With permission from his daughter, the team will continue to list him as a co-author on reports from the study.