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.
I'm envisioning all elephants working together with discipline and coordination which would make it nearly impossible to stop them.
Were they? Or was it a consequence of changing climate from the Ice Age?
Fun project trying to test the direction of causality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park
[1] https://www.krugerpark.co.za/kruger-park-news-study-shows-el...
Also I deny the premise that all climate change is bad prima facie, although again because complex dynamical system it can be impossible to predict the eventual outcomes. Nevertheless, a climate change like greening the Sahara could at least potentially be a net positive for humanity.
Now I highly doubt that an elephant occasionally knocking over a tree is the only thing holding back the continent from being forested, especially given that many elephants live in densely forested areas, but if for the sake of argument we assume that their behavior is a major factor, you still need to explain why their behavior, and thus that forcing function acting on the environment, would suddenly change.
Indian and African elephants are quite different ecologically speaking.
> but if for the sake of argument we assume that their behavior is a major factor, you still need to explain why their behavior, and thus that forcing function acting on the environment, would suddenly change
I never claimed it would suddenly change, I claimed that it's been consistent and has maintained a status quo.
Am I misunderstanding you?
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part...
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).
Pre-gunpowder humanity would be toast.
> It would only work if the elephants were completely disciplined and ignored injury, death of friends, and noise
How about drugged elephants then? What if, in this increasingly sci-fi alt history setting, the elephants were just smart enough to figure out a) what kind of plant, mushroom or whatever makes them go berserk, b) realize berserk elephants are much better at effectively fighting humans, c) were willing to make individuals sacrifice themselves for the herd, and d) were able to consistently use berserk assaults as a battle tactic?
I know it's a lot of assumptions, but I won't have mere historical facts make me let go of the image of OG ultralisks attacking pre-industrial humanity.
Here's the fly in the ointment.
Berserk elephants would not be better at fighting in the same way that berserk humans aren't better at fighting. It's discipline and order that make an effective fighting force.
If you know anything about ancient hand-to-hand battles, you'd know that there were very few casualties during the battle proper. It's only when one side's formation broke and their soldiers became chaotic and disorganized that the real casualties occurred.
If I were to guess, I'd guess that you're getting this idea from movies where the main character harnesses emotion to become more capable and powerful. In the real world, emotional people die quickly and are generally ineffective.
It would be interesting to see them execute the Fabian strategy though.
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.
They set the pigs on fire and sent them towards the elephants, who panicked and trampled the people around them.
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!
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.
On a more serious note, it may be due to similar genetics to humans, specifically the LINE family of transposons.[0] Though, maybe they’re just aliens.[1]
[0] - https://www.livescience.com/jumping-genes-octopus-intelligen...
[1] - https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/123479-trending-science-...
But we can't actually run down a horse. Only top ultra marathoners can do that.
But walking down a horse? Really?
Horses are incredibly fragile, and over long distances would prefer to be moving at human walking speed.
Horses also require continuous grazing to sustain themselves, and because of how their digestive tracts work, really need time to amass energy.
It's not a question of "running down a horse." It's a question of heat exchange and endurance. Humans are incredibly efficient at maintaining homeostasis "under load." Horses are not.
If you read a histories any war/conflict where there are large numbers of horses involved, a common theme is them just dropping dead of exhaustion along the side of the trail, because they can't sustain the pace of the army marching with them.
This is assuming that most of the army were full of people walking and the horses walking along side were getting exhausted? So an average human can walk down a horse?
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?
Like maybe if the Wilson Island Mammoths [1] had just a bit easier time of it, or their populations weren't quite as small (or by luck of the dice were much smarter!) then they could have survived.
In fact it would have really helped elephants if some of them were smart enough not to be made extinct by humans! Maybe if humans had been just a little less competent, pressuring but not exterminating the wooly mammoths...
E.g.: humans could reach high technology relatively easily because our environment and physiology enables tool use, etc…
But if “takeoff” is blocked, and evolution continues, then it might still be possible for an aquatic species to overcome the limitations of their environment — but only once they’ve reached the much higher level of intelligence required to find workarounds for their miriad problems!
There would be living ships, of course. This is a Star Maker reference.
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.
Elephants can't digest enough calorie rich food to be able to do this. They individually have to spend longer eating.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part...
Armies yes. Standing, not so much no. Human history is 100,000-200,000 years. That would be < 3% of human history. To do this, humans had to invent pre-feudal client/vassal networks of specialized food producer and warrior classes. This for the very reason that most humans had to spend most of their time in the act of producing food.
Very few societies could afford a large standing army. There would be one or two village watchmen to keep watch over night. The king might have a dozen guards that were well trained. The bulk of the army was farmers conscripted a few weeks before at need, and sent back home when done. The economies just couldn't support more when 95% of the total human population had to be a farmer just to grow enough food.
There were exceptions. The Romans did manage to hold large standing armies, but they were exceptions.
If you're suggesting there wouldn't be enough food to feed an army of humans, need I remind you that elephants are made of meat?
And on a similar note, only 24 rabbits were needed to successfully invade and colonize Australia[0]. And despite multiple plagues over hundreds of years, they’re nowhere close to the end of their rabbit war.[1]
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/23/australi...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_plagues_in_Australia
From wikipedia:
In June 1935, 102 cane toads (Rhinella marina, formerly ICZN Bufo marinus) were imported to Gordonvale from Hawaii, with one dying in transit due to dehydration. By March 1937, some 62,000 toadlets were bred in captivity and then released in areas around Cairns, Gordonvale, and Innisfail in northern Queensland. More toads were released around Ingham, Ayr, Mackay, and Bundaberg.[6] Releases were temporarily limited because of environmental concerns, but resumed in other areas after September 1936.
Since their release, toads have rapidly multiplied. They now[when?] number over 200 million and have been known to spread diseases, thereby affecting local biodiversity.[7] Not only has the introduction of the toads has caused significant environmental detriment, but there is no evidence that they have affected the number of cane beetles which they were introduced to prey upon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
It seems modern humans are not very good at ecological balancing. Especially not in Australia. I believe the original local aboriginal people were trying to get the hang of it however before they were rudely interrupted by the colonialists.
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?
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.
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.
Also many people think that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans.
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.