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If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia. An

If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia. 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.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone. I for one don't think I'd be disciplined enough to hold my ground against charging ~~Ultralisks~~ elephants with just a musket in hand.
- FredPret 3y ago
  It would only work if the elephants were completely disciplined and ignored injury, death of friends, and noise. But they could take down all but thick walls, and they can absorb a lot of bullets / almost unlimited arrows. They wouldn't have battlefield medicine (no hands) and their population does not grow very fast. Pre-gunpowder humanity would be toast.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    With all the excellent counterpoints to my comment by you and others in mind, > 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.
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > realize berserk elephants are much better at effectively fighting humans 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.
    - someweirdperson 3y ago
      Enough with shark movies. There needs to be one with elephants.
      - FredPret 3y ago
        If sharks can be in a tornado, elephants can all jump and cause an earthquake!
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Tie that up with some mis-reading of ancient Mayan calendar that turned out to be talking about 2024, a comet crashing into the Moon, with elephants reacting to the scarred lunar surface by synchronous jumping. Cue emergency space mission, where our heroes race against the clock to re-paint the Moon, so the elephants stop jumping while there's still some civilization left to return to.
- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  There's a story in the Jungle Book about just that. That said, wild pigs are frightening, they are armed and brave.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  We know that's not true. The Romans had no problem repelling them at the Battle of Zama. The legion or phalanx would just need to be trained to make noise to frighten them and open up lanes for the elephant to charge through (they weren't keen on charging into a wall of spears), and then you have a dedicated group of skirmishers to hunt the elephants down once they pass the line.
  - njarboe 3y ago
    But I think the idea here is that the elephants in question are at a similar level to humans intellectually. They will be able to overcome fears (be courageous), plan with others, use tools, etc. Hard to know how would come out on top in that case. Probably would come down to food consumption, reproduction rates, adaptability to various environments etc. more than who would win in head-to-head battles.
    - arrosenberg 3y ago
      The lack of opposable thumbs would significantly limit their ability to craft tools. Even if they could use trunks to craft melee or throwing weapons, there is no way for even the most intelligent, coordinated elephants to overcome a ditch with a line of ballistae or cannon on the other side. Cavalry were able to deal with this due to their relatively thin profile and high maneuverability, and even then ditch + spear wall + artillery or ditch + grape shot is a pretty effective counter. It would be interesting to see them execute the Fabian strategy though.
- allturtles 3y ago
  Maybe, if we are positing alternate-history elephants that will hold formation like trained warriors. 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.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone. 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.
- fl7305 3y ago
  The Romans are said to have used war pigs against elephants. They set the pigs on fire and sent them towards the elephants, who panicked and trampled the people around them.
cocothem 3y ago
make that few hundred thousand years ago. We were probably much more fragile then, but still doubtful any other animal could
vlovich123 3y ago
I don’t think 200 years ago is enough time. Humans already had centrally fortified positions (castles), cannons, guns etc. heck the Gatling gun was already 162 years ago. You need to go further back but that would likely just extend the inevitable as humans extend their technological advantage where the elephants aren’t (eg colder climates which is where a lot of tech advancement happened). So for them to actually defend against humans they’d need to similarly be able to do tech which their morphology prevents them from engaging in really. There’s also the other problem that they’re territorial but not expansionist. They’re not like lions that capture and defend large swathes of territory either. They just protect their herd / fight elephants for territory which makes sense because they’re not predators like we are. In other words, not only do they need richer communication to organize (which arguably they probably do to some extent), they need to have a complete change in how they’ve evolved to think about the world in terms of hunting like a pack / developing military strategy. Humans are annoyingly adaptable and dangerous and will adapt military techniques (and by the 1800s we’ve had millennia of fine tuning armies)
perlgeek 3y ago
I'm pretty sure elephants can communicate with each other and coordinate, at least to some degree. As do many social species. 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.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > why did humans evolve to build huge civilizations and spent so much energy on technology, when others species haven't? 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.)
- toast0 3y ago
  Toxoplasmosis forces us to work for cats. Developing society allows us to better care for cats. QED.
- moi2388 3y ago
kibwen 3y ago
Humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction 10,000 years ago, and those were the size of African elephants.
- FredPret 3y ago
  There was probably never a woolly rebellion where they banded together against us though
concordDance 3y ago
Humans with spears can take on elephants. You'd probably have to go back to the invention of fire for elephants to drive humans out. Intelligence is a huge advantage, humans can make walls, have pike formations, farm fields, burn down forests, etc.
- FredPret 3y ago
  A bull elephant is the true king of the jungle. But a lot of humans with zero self-regard could take down maybe one or two elephants at a time. 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.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    Is digging a trench modern technology?
  - kabouseng 3y ago
    Well I am pretty sure elephants were used as mounts of war, and they were not unstoppable for opposing armies. Terrifying yes, but not an auto win.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      IIRC they saw initial success but saw diminishing returns as it was figured out that they scare quite easily by fire, loud noises, pike formations, etc. If you manage to panic an elephant still in the enemy lines it can do quite some damage to their troops.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      Hannibal did terrify Rome with them for a while, but Scipio Africanus figured out a very simple strategy to defeat them, which won the second Punic war for Rome at the battle of Zama. He just made corridors in his formation and channeled the elephants down them, which then ran away scared from the battle all together.
bioemerl 3y ago
They kind of did. Mammoths and such existed for a very long time and it seemed like life on earth was big, not as big as in the time of the dinosaurs, but a lot of creatures were getting quite large akin to 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!
ianbicking 3y ago
It feels to me like it's a coincidence of evolutionary pressures and timelines that humans evolved to a take-off level of intelligence before elephants or whales. Whales especially just haven't had the time, they are a much younger species/order than primates. If humpback whales had been contemporaneous with, say, australopithecus, who knows how things would have gone. And elephants maybe just didn't win the roll of the dice, it feels like there were some very pivotal moments of evolution where our ancestors were under tremendous pressure, where small populations and a tenuous grasp on species survival led to unique intellectual adaptations. 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.html https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/r_and_k_selection/r_and_k...
- sjducb 3y ago
  Whales lack hands. It's hard to build anything without hands. Without technology intelligence isn't much use.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Humans are incredibly badass physically once they reach adulthood. We have endurance, immune systems, and digestive systems that seem tailor-made for world domination. (you could walk a horse to death, and that's an animal we bred for endurance) The catch is you have to be smart to take advantage of these things.
  - TrainedMonkey 3y ago
    And tool usage, turns out articulated appendages with articulated grippy sausages are effective, energy efficient, and can apply both power and precision.
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
badpun 3y ago
They didn't prove to be that important in pre-modern warfare, though. Much less impactful than a horse. So maybe they're actually not that hard to deal with.
TSiege 3y ago
Humans literally made mammoths extinct with stone tools on multiple continents
- bilsbie 3y ago
  Mammoths could have made those same tools though. The trunks had the dexterity.
bilsbie 3y ago
This would make an amazing premise for a novel or movie!
rvba 3y ago
Couldnt they also be stopped by simple ditches / dugouts - maybe guarded by some warriors with spears?
starbase 3y ago
Delusional. It would be no contest. 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.
- DubiousPusher 3y ago
  > We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes 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.
  - byby 3y ago
    Yeah but this was definitely achieve well before 200 years. Armies existed since the dawn of civilization. We are talking B.C. dates.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Most armies where farmers who did a little bit of training in their village in the off season. They would be called up for specific battles, given a couple weeks training and then off to battle, those who survived went back home. 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.
  - Balero 3y ago
    So people can fill in 5 mins, whilst the others work to do this. Elephants can't digest enough calorie rich food to be able to do this. They individually have to spend longer eating.
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
Humans hunted mammoths friend.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
Humans had long settled in places that elephants couldn't survive by 200 years ago. They wouldn't fare better attacking Russia in winter than Napoleon did. I don't know how well they could tolerate winter in Germany, say. 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?
zyang 3y ago
That made me laugh. Ever seen an elephant trying to climb out of a ditch.
addled 3y ago
I've read that the Romans got pretty good at anti-elephant tactics. https://acoup.blog/tag/elephants/ https://acoup.blog/tag/elephants/
glerk 3y ago
Even at comparable levels of intelligence and social coordination, agility and opposable thumbs go a long way. This is a fun thought experiment, but my bet is on the humans.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  but they have opposable noses
ftxbro 3y ago
i'm not judging it but the fact this thread got so much hacker news engagement is interesting like we are cavemen and we want to talk about how we can fight elephants and mammoths
1970-01-01 3y ago
>If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia. The trebuchet would be enough to stop them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#Comparison_of_different_artillery_weapons 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#History
- qubyte 3y ago
  I think you’d struggle to convince an elephant to get into the trebuchet though.
Nifty3929 3y ago
Trenches would stop them pretty well.
sandworm101 3y ago
>> 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. 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.
lIl-IIIl 3y ago
African hunter gatherers have been hunting elephants for ages without guns or steel, who are maybe fearless but definitely not stupid. Search for "Pygmy elephant hunt". Also many people think that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans.
dickholesalad 3y ago
We already did this. Humans hunted all the megafauna, including mammoths, to extinction.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone. I for one don't think I'd be disciplined enough to hold my ground against charging ~~Ultralisks~~ elephants with just a musket in hand.

FredPret 3y ago
It would only work if the elephants were completely disciplined and ignored injury, death of friends, and noise. But they could take down all but thick walls, and they can absorb a lot of bullets / almost unlimited arrows. They wouldn't have battlefield medicine (no hands) and their population does not grow very fast. Pre-gunpowder humanity would be toast.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  With all the excellent counterpoints to my comment by you and others in mind, > 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.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > realize berserk elephants are much better at effectively fighting humans 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.
  - someweirdperson 3y ago
    Enough with shark movies. There needs to be one with elephants.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      If sharks can be in a tornado, elephants can all jump and cause an earthquake!
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Tie that up with some mis-reading of ancient Mayan calendar that turned out to be talking about 2024, a comet crashing into the Moon, with elephants reacting to the scarred lunar surface by synchronous jumping. Cue emergency space mission, where our heroes race against the clock to re-paint the Moon, so the elephants stop jumping while there's still some civilization left to return to.
HarryHirsch 3y ago
There's a story in the Jungle Book about just that. That said, wild pigs are frightening, they are armed and brave.
arrosenberg 3y ago
We know that's not true. The Romans had no problem repelling them at the Battle of Zama. The legion or phalanx would just need to be trained to make noise to frighten them and open up lanes for the elephant to charge through (they weren't keen on charging into a wall of spears), and then you have a dedicated group of skirmishers to hunt the elephants down once they pass the line.
- njarboe 3y ago
  But I think the idea here is that the elephants in question are at a similar level to humans intellectually. They will be able to overcome fears (be courageous), plan with others, use tools, etc. Hard to know how would come out on top in that case. Probably would come down to food consumption, reproduction rates, adaptability to various environments etc. more than who would win in head-to-head battles.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    The lack of opposable thumbs would significantly limit their ability to craft tools. Even if they could use trunks to craft melee or throwing weapons, there is no way for even the most intelligent, coordinated elephants to overcome a ditch with a line of ballistae or cannon on the other side. Cavalry were able to deal with this due to their relatively thin profile and high maneuverability, and even then ditch + spear wall + artillery or ditch + grape shot is a pretty effective counter. It would be interesting to see them execute the Fabian strategy though.
allturtles 3y ago
Maybe, if we are positing alternate-history elephants that will hold formation like trained warriors. 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.
nordsieck 3y ago
> Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone. 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.
fl7305 3y ago
The Romans are said to have used war pigs against elephants. They set the pigs on fire and sent them towards the elephants, who panicked and trampled the people around them.

cocothem 3y ago

make that few hundred thousand years ago. We were probably much more fragile then, but still doubtful any other animal could

vlovich123 3y ago

I don’t think 200 years ago is enough time. Humans already had centrally fortified positions (castles), cannons, guns etc. heck the Gatling gun was already 162 years ago. You need to go further back but that would likely just extend the inevitable as humans extend their technological advantage where the elephants aren’t (eg colder climates which is where a lot of tech advancement happened). So for them to actually defend against humans they’d need to similarly be able to do tech which their morphology prevents them from engaging in really. There’s also the other problem that they’re territorial but not expansionist. They’re not like lions that capture and defend large swathes of territory either. They just protect their herd / fight elephants for territory which makes sense because they’re not predators like we are. In other words, not only do they need richer communication to organize (which arguably they probably do to some extent), they need to have a complete change in how they’ve evolved to think about the world in terms of hunting like a pack / developing military strategy. Humans are annoyingly adaptable and dangerous and will adapt military techniques (and by the 1800s we’ve had millennia of fine tuning armies)

perlgeek 3y ago

I'm pretty sure elephants can communicate with each other and coordinate, at least to some degree. As do many social species. 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.

crazygringo 3y ago
> why did humans evolve to build huge civilizations and spent so much energy on technology, when others species haven't? 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.)
toast0 3y ago
Toxoplasmosis forces us to work for cats. Developing society allows us to better care for cats. QED.
moi2388 3y ago

kibwen 3y ago

Humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction 10,000 years ago, and those were the size of African elephants.

FredPret 3y ago
There was probably never a woolly rebellion where they banded together against us though

concordDance 3y ago

Humans with spears can take on elephants. You'd probably have to go back to the invention of fire for elephants to drive humans out. Intelligence is a huge advantage, humans can make walls, have pike formations, farm fields, burn down forests, etc.

FredPret 3y ago
A bull elephant is the true king of the jungle. But a lot of humans with zero self-regard could take down maybe one or two elephants at a time. 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.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Is digging a trench modern technology?
- kabouseng 3y ago
  Well I am pretty sure elephants were used as mounts of war, and they were not unstoppable for opposing armies. Terrifying yes, but not an auto win.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    IIRC they saw initial success but saw diminishing returns as it was figured out that they scare quite easily by fire, loud noises, pike formations, etc. If you manage to panic an elephant still in the enemy lines it can do quite some damage to their troops.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    Hannibal did terrify Rome with them for a while, but Scipio Africanus figured out a very simple strategy to defeat them, which won the second Punic war for Rome at the battle of Zama. He just made corridors in his formation and channeled the elephants down them, which then ran away scared from the battle all together.

bioemerl 3y ago

They kind of did. Mammoths and such existed for a very long time and it seemed like life on earth was big, not as big as in the time of the dinosaurs, but a lot of creatures were getting quite large akin to 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!

ianbicking 3y ago

It feels to me like it's a coincidence of evolutionary pressures and timelines that humans evolved to a take-off level of intelligence before elephants or whales. Whales especially just haven't had the time, they are a much younger species/order than primates. If humpback whales had been contemporaneous with, say, australopithecus, who knows how things would have gone. And elephants maybe just didn't win the roll of the dice, it feels like there were some very pivotal moments of evolution where our ancestors were under tremendous pressure, where small populations and a tenuous grasp on species survival led to unique intellectual adaptations. 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.html https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/r_and_k_selection/r_and_k...

sjducb 3y ago
Whales lack hands. It's hard to build anything without hands. Without technology intelligence isn't much use.
FredPret 3y ago
Humans are incredibly badass physically once they reach adulthood. We have endurance, immune systems, and digestive systems that seem tailor-made for world domination. (you could walk a horse to death, and that's an animal we bred for endurance) The catch is you have to be smart to take advantage of these things.
- TrainedMonkey 3y ago
  And tool usage, turns out articulated appendages with articulated grippy sausages are effective, energy efficient, and can apply both power and precision.

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago

[dead]

badpun 3y ago

They didn't prove to be that important in pre-modern warfare, though. Much less impactful than a horse. So maybe they're actually not that hard to deal with.

TSiege 3y ago

Humans literally made mammoths extinct with stone tools on multiple continents

bilsbie 3y ago
Mammoths could have made those same tools though. The trunks had the dexterity.

bilsbie 3y ago

This would make an amazing premise for a novel or movie!

rvba 3y ago

Couldnt they also be stopped by simple ditches / dugouts - maybe guarded by some warriors with spears?

starbase 3y ago

Delusional. It would be no contest. 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.

DubiousPusher 3y ago
> We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes 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.
- byby 3y ago
  Yeah but this was definitely achieve well before 200 years. Armies existed since the dawn of civilization. We are talking B.C. dates.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Most armies where farmers who did a little bit of training in their village in the off season. They would be called up for specific battles, given a couple weeks training and then off to battle, those who survived went back home. 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.
- Balero 3y ago
  So people can fill in 5 mins, whilst the others work to do this. Elephants can't digest enough calorie rich food to be able to do this. They individually have to spend longer eating.

jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago

Humans hunted mammoths friend.

kevinmchugh 3y ago

Humans had long settled in places that elephants couldn't survive by 200 years ago. They wouldn't fare better attacking Russia in winter than Napoleon did. I don't know how well they could tolerate winter in Germany, say. 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?

zyang 3y ago

That made me laugh. Ever seen an elephant trying to climb out of a ditch.

addled 3y ago

I've read that the Romans got pretty good at anti-elephant tactics. https://acoup.blog/tag/elephants/ https://acoup.blog/tag/elephants/

glerk 3y ago

Even at comparable levels of intelligence and social coordination, agility and opposable thumbs go a long way. This is a fun thought experiment, but my bet is on the humans.

ftxbro 3y ago
but they have opposable noses

ftxbro 3y ago

i'm not judging it but the fact this thread got so much hacker news engagement is interesting like we are cavemen and we want to talk about how we can fight elephants and mammoths

1970-01-01 3y ago

>If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia. The trebuchet would be enough to stop them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#Comparison_of_different_artillery_weapons 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#History

qubyte 3y ago
I think you’d struggle to convince an elephant to get into the trebuchet though.

Nifty3929 3y ago

Trenches would stop them pretty well.

sandworm101 3y ago

>> 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. 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.

lIl-IIIl 3y ago

African hunter gatherers have been hunting elephants for ages without guns or steel, who are maybe fearless but definitely not stupid. Search for "Pygmy elephant hunt". Also many people think that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans.

dickholesalad 3y ago

We already did this. Humans hunted all the megafauna, including mammoths, to extinction.