Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Untamable African elephants?
The story of elephants in Africa is puzzlingly dif erent. We have no recorded
instances of any of the native peoples of sub-Saharan Africa trying to tame
African savannah or forest elephants.
The elephants that lived north of the Sahara may have been more tractable.
Hannibal, the North African general who almost succeeded in conquering
Rome two centuries before the start of the Common Era, took more than thirty
elephants with him in his march across the Alps. These elephants may have been
a local North African race, now extinct. Or they may have been from south of
the Sahara—a Carthaginian coin from that time shows an unmistakably big-
eared African-type elephant. But Gavin de Beer has pointed out that Carthage
is known to have traded with Egypt, and that the Egyptians had captured Indian
elephants during their earlier wars in Syria. So there is a good possibility that
Hannibal's fi ghting elephants were actually the more tractable Indian species.
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Figure 98
A killer elephant in Bandipur National Park in southern India. Elephants in India
have a mix of wild and tame ancestors, and after thousands of years of attempted taming by
humans none are still truly wild.
