An elephant goes where he wants and does what he wants, and only extremely thick steel or a fearless / stupid human with an elephant gun can stop it.
Now imagine 100k elephants working together and humanity is armed only with muskets.
I imagine primitve cannon would be effective, but in this alternate history, disciplined young elephants might charge and overcome an artillery position.
Elephants are terrain-limited herbivores with limited manual dexterity and zero technology. They must spend most of their waking hours foraging.
We are omnivorous masters of terrain, endurance, fire, weapons, ropes, rock quarrying, deforestation, and deception. We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes and spend the rest of the day waging war.
That is not at all now it has gone for most of human history. Feudalism and its ancient world precursors, an entire religious-social-economic system of vassalage, was necessary concentrate the tiny bits of surplus food into long standing specialized military forces.
It would be fun to imagine a world where the Americas were just out of reach of human migration, but an elephant species on the continents developed speech and abstraction. In my mind it would be a smaller species of elephant, of which there were many, and who may have more need to take advantage of intelligence to prosper.
I also think about r- and K-selected species [1]; whether the survival of a species depends on the fitness of the individual or the fitness of the parent. Humans are incredible parents (being K-selected), and we preserve our line by preserving our children. We're physically decent I suppose, but definitely not as children. Whales are similar, with small numbers of children who require almost heroic parental effort to raise. Elephants are definitely on the same spectrum.
[1] https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/r_and_k_selection/r_and_k...
The catch is you have to be smart to take advantage of these things.
Since elephants aren't carnivores I don't think they would get much benefit out of the reasoning skills that enabled us to be really excellent pack hunters, which was probably why more intelligent ancestors of humans managed to out-compete the less intelligent ones.
If elephants gain abstract reasoning skills what does it get them? More efficient harvesting of bananas?
There would be living ships, of course. This is a Star Maker reference.
Perhaps an ancient Roman legion with a ballista - and balls of steel - could do some damage.
But you can only stop a herd of elephants that work together with modern technology.
The only early walls that can stop elephants would would be castle walls and thicker, and those are major projects that you'd have to undertake while getting tusked and stomped. Maybe ditches would work better, or caltrops.
Humans then left Africa and killed them all off. Our environmental niche seems to be perfect for hunting and killing big grazers.
It's our world now!
Or a small ditch. Or fast-moving water. Or rocky terrain. Or any incline of more than 25 degrees. An elephant is about as off-road capable as a Humvee or Jeep. It can do great things in the commercials, but in reality can only handle a small percentage of realworld terrain. Humans and other predators are amazing capable across most any terrain. Even without firearms, we would have wiped them out in a single generation had we put our minds to the task.
We managed to deal with mammoths.
We have pretty strong empirical evidence that real life elephants do not seriously outclass formations of humans armed with iron weapons. They were used in warfare in the Mediterranean for a few hundred years and in Asia for many centuries after that. They had some shock value, but never became a dominant, war-winning component of any army.
Even trained war elephants weren't great, or at least that was the conclusion of the Romans once they had enough experience with them.
They might be enough to route civilians, but probably not anyone in the military. Soldiers used to be expected to walk into enemy canon and musket fire with discipline and good order.
Also, there were black powder elephant guns. Apparently 4-bore rifles were popular for both big game and birds.
Pre-gunpowder humanity would be toast.
They set the pigs on fire and sent them towards the elephants, who panicked and trampled the people around them.
And, echoing other comments here, their close relatives who _could_ tolerate winter outside the tropics were long extinct by this point.
Edit to add: the worst they could do would be raiding parties in the late summer and autumn, eating whole harvests. Landbound pachyderm Vikings?
For me, a really interesting question is: why did humans evolve to build huge civilizations and spent so much energy on technology, when others species haven't?
I've heard several podcasts, some claim it's because humans think (much more) about the future. Others say it's because we use counterfactual reasoning. Others again say it's because we think about the future. Yet others say it's our curiosity, that seem to be much more pronounced than in other species.
None of these really convinced me. I kinda think that if we didn't encroach on other species' ecosystems and waited just a few million (or a few tens of million) years, some other species might develop and dominate similar to how humans do now.
Of course, that's not really practical, so now I wonder if there could be a way to simulate that.
In a nutshell -- because humans invented agriculture, which led to ballooning human populations, and then the agriculture at scale required to sustain those populations required centralized laws and control (e.g. enforcing legal contracts around shared irrigation) which is a civilization. And agriculture is so valuable that civilizations use the economic surplus to invent weapons to invade other civilizations, so we jump from food tech to warfare tech.
But agriculture seems to be the main factor. Of course you can go further back and ask why humans invented agriculture where other animals haven't, and it's probably some combination of opposable thumbs and the social intelligence we developed to live in tribes etc. Elephants might have tremendous social intelligence but they don't seem to have the physical dexterity to hoe a field. (There might also be something about physical size, where elephants are too big, so they eat too much relative to what agriculture could produce through their physical output.)
Another answer of course is 'they have, but they're extinct/superseded now' (others of the homo genus).
The trebuchet would be enough to stop them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#Comparison_of_differ...
>Now imagine 100k elephants working together and humanity is armed only with muskets.
Crossbow would be sufficient. Your target is as big as an elephant. Whaling harpoons were also very popular for a very long time.
Also many people think that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans.
what if we've been 'domesticating' them by killing the tuskiest ones for ivory or because we don't like their musth rampages, neotenizing even the wild populations
Are million+ years recent?
Humans successfully hunt big animals since we exist and all the hunter societies that still exist, share the idea that the biggest trophies come from killing the most fearsome animals. And if an animal killed a tribe member, killing that specific animal comes with great respect for the hunter. So the organized hunting of elephants especially for their tusks might be a recent thing, but killing dangerous individuals is not.
See: the aurochs (ancestor of the modern cow) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
The boar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar
The jackrabbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare
The junglefowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl
etc.
I was surrounded by a herd of elephants in Pilansberg National Park in South Africa. We remained calm and they just walked around our vehicle.
Was simultaneously terrifying and thrilling at the same time.
I'm honestly not sure the term is even well-defined.
Here's basically the same article about bonobos,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tame-theory-did-b...
Being less aggressive, if I'm not reading things backwards, allows for a longer maturation time, and perhaps higher intelligence. Some domesticated animals show high intelligence, like bonobos and dogs. I wonder if the same idea applies to dolphins.
wildcats, such as the species Felis lybica, began exploiting new resources offered by human environments, such as a proliferation of rodents in grain stores. These cats were tolerated by people, supporting their natural evolution to deviate further from their wild counterparts
Maybe a better word would be "socialized".
tl;dr - they want democracy
Using this word in the title is clearly not reflecting the nature of what might be happening. The correct term would probably be neoteny [2] or juvenilization
[1] Britannica and every other credible reference on the English language out there
> Yet he and evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University have long held that self-domestication—a phenomenon where wild animals develop traits that are similar to domesticated animals [...].
"Elephants may be self-domesticating" would sound odd to the general reader. Indeed the paper referenced[2] is titled "Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication".
And the much smaller populations that remain tend to be the less aggressive/less dangerous ones.
the bears, wolves, tigers and lions you listed are things that are still alive, humans probably got along with them more over the past 10-20,000 years than they did all the things they hunted to extinction. i think its rare to find a large animal, bigger than a small dog, that doesn't look cute in some way [to humans] when its not angry. this was their defense mechanism.
The story I heard about wolf domestication was that some wolfs started living nearer to humans, cooperated during hunts, ate their scrap etc. I would consider this self-domestication.
If humans had captured wolfs and selectively bred them to be less aggressive, that wouldn't be self-domestication.
Or am I totally off track here?
Here's one article on the matter: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/domestica...
