There were two kinds of African Elephants; one from North Africa were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation. North African elephants were very small and lightly built compared to Asian varieties.

The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant

There were three african species, now there are two:

- the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant)

- the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)

> were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation

That would be a highly unusual trajectory.

Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.

And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.

My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.

Was over-exploitation really the key factor in North African elephants going extinct? I always thought it was due to increasing desertification + the expansion of human settlement in North Africa, but that's just idle speculation

I was just coming here to comment on this. The blog is "Unmitigated Pedantry" after all so I think this kind of detail would be appreciated

It is mentioned in one of the captions.