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Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019) by z3phyr on Friday October 23, 2020 @01:03PM (#24871551)
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

Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019) by marci on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:29PM (#24876154)
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)

Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019) by thaumasiotes on Friday October 23, 2020 @02:53PM (#24872601)
> 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.

Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019) by DavidAdams on Friday October 23, 2020 @05:54PM (#24874673)
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.
Re:War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019) by InfiniteRand on Saturday October 24, 2020 @01:21AM (#24877152)
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