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*Hemidactylus*
Aug 4, 2012, 10:36:41 PM8/4/12
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If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
elephant guns as tools of carnage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_gun
Seems elephant violence against abusive trainers and attacks on
encroaching villagers came way too late in the ballgame for the war on
humans to succeed. And maybe it's our impacts on them that cause
societal fragmentation, like loss of matriarchs or older bulls, that
leads to some of their aberrant behaviors. And as I said before natural
history is written by the victors, but G.A. Bradshaw seems to be giving
them a fair shake of the trunk in _Elephants on the Edge_.
Does this picture mean Teddy Roosevelt was superior to his prey?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roosevelt_safari_elephant2.jpg
He had the tool of death. Lacking guns or other weapons how do humans
match up to elephants? Do guns make us more intelligent than them? Could
elephants learn to shoot projectiles from their trunks at humans? That
would be a real elephant gun.
humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
elephant guns as tools of carnage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_gun
Seems elephant violence against abusive trainers and attacks on
encroaching villagers came way too late in the ballgame for the war on
humans to succeed. And maybe it's our impacts on them that cause
societal fragmentation, like loss of matriarchs or older bulls, that
leads to some of their aberrant behaviors. And as I said before natural
history is written by the victors, but G.A. Bradshaw seems to be giving
them a fair shake of the trunk in _Elephants on the Edge_.
Does this picture mean Teddy Roosevelt was superior to his prey?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roosevelt_safari_elephant2.jpg
He had the tool of death. Lacking guns or other weapons how do humans
match up to elephants? Do guns make us more intelligent than them? Could
elephants learn to shoot projectiles from their trunks at humans? That
would be a real elephant gun.
Ron O
Aug 5, 2012, 8:47:43 AM8/5/12
to
On Aug 4, 9:36�pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
They haven't done that to lions and hyenas so the answer is likely no.
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_gun
>
> Seems elephant violence against abusive trainers and attacks on
> encroaching villagers came way too late in the ballgame for the war on
> humans to succeed. And maybe it's our impacts on them that cause
> societal fragmentation, like loss of matriarchs or older bulls, that
> leads to some of their aberrant behaviors. And as I said before natural
> history is written by the victors, but G.A. Bradshaw seems to be giving
> them a fair shake of the trunk in _Elephants on the Edge_.
>
> Does this picture mean Teddy Roosevelt was superior to his prey?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roosevelt_safari_elephant2.jpg
>
> He had the tool of death. Lacking guns or other weapons how do humans
> match up to elephants? Do guns make us more intelligent than them? Could
> elephants learn to shoot projectiles from their trunks at humans? That
> would be a real elephant gun.
primates where our ancestors used their hands to better grab their
insect prey instead of evolving sticky tongues, transitioned into
fruitivores and developed things like color vision with a constant
increase in brain to body weight ratio, then had a brachiating
lifestyle to better develop hand eye coordination, then spent more
time on the ground so that our hands could do more than grab food and
keep us up in the trees, and then a more upright stance and bipedal
locomotion freed up the hands even more. Once we got opposable thumbs
our lineage was pretty much set to develop tool use to a greater
extent than any other lineage on the planet.
Elephants could have developed slavery and used our ancestors to make
elephant guns and grow food for them when the ecosystem went nuts
after they obliterated all the carnivores and competitive herbivores
that the elephants didn't like. If they weren't far sighted enough
they could cause global ecological disasters and become extinct.
Ron Okimoto
Nick Keighley
Aug 5, 2012, 9:09:50 AM8/5/12
to
On Aug 5, 3:36�am, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans?
I don't think elephants are smart enough to do any of this
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans?
>Long ago we lacked
> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
Fire can be used to drive them.
<snip>
> Does this picture mean Teddy Roosevelt was superior to his prey?
> He had the tool of death. Lacking guns or other weapons how do humans
> match up to elephants?
> Do guns make us more intelligent than them?
> Could
> elephants learn to shoot projectiles from their trunks at humans?
velocity compared with a gun
>That
> would be a real elephant gun.
*Hemidactylus*
Aug 5, 2012, 10:45:46 AM8/5/12
to
On 08/05/2012 08:47 AM, Ron O wrote:
> On Aug 4, 9:36 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
>> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
>> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
>> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
>> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
>> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
>> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
>
> They haven't done that to lions and hyenas so the answer is likely no.
Is it because they are too dependent on one leader to make decisions for
> On Aug 4, 9:36 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
>> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
>> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
>> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
>> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
>> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
>> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
>
> They haven't done that to lions and hyenas so the answer is likely no.
the herd? The knowledge this leader (the matriarch) possesses could make
one herd more successful than the other and determine how elephants deal
with threats like lions:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/15/older-elephants-know-the-best-anti-lion-moves/
If past pachyderms were more like the sorts of elephants that break bad
and kill trainers, attack villages, or bugger and kill rhinos, things
might have turned out differently for us. But matriarchs are too much a
stabilizing force as are mature bulls, so it is only the crazy displaced
elephants of recent times that could have done us in I reckon.
Oh well.
*Hemidactylus*
Aug 5, 2012, 10:58:29 AM8/5/12
to
On 08/05/2012 09:09 AM, Nick Keighley wrote:
> On Aug 5, 3:36 am, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
>> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
>> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
>> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
>> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
>> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans?
>
> I don't think elephants are smart enough to do any of this
Could they have a memory capacity comparable to ours given their large
> On Aug 5, 3:36 am, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
>> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
>> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
>> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
>> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
>> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans?
>
> I don't think elephants are smart enough to do any of this
hippocampi? Yet is this memory capacity bottlenecked in one individual
(the matriarch), thus making herd dynamics rest on the shoulders of her
accumulated knowledge base? Do elephants debate or make consensus
decisions or are they more autocratic?
Since the main purpose of this thread was to break the thundering herd
out of that other thread here is a copy and paste from my recent
followup to Perseus:
Where do humans rate versus elephants for memory?
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Why-Elephants-Have-Such-a-Long-Memory-77563.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1285532.stm
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/elephant-memory-leadership/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition
[quote]Elephants also have a very large and highly convoluted
hippocampus, a brain structure in the limbic system that is much bigger
than that of any human, primate or cetacean.[15] The hippocampus of an
elephant takes up about 0.7% of the central structures of the brain,
comparable to 0.5% for humans and with 0.1% in Risso's dolphins and
0.05% in bottlenose dolphins.[16]
The hippocampus is linked to emotion through the processing of certain
types of memory, especially spatial. This is thought to be possibly why
elephants suffer from psychological flashbacks and the equivalent of
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[17][18][/quote]
www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/pdfs/hakeem2005.pdf
[quote]ABSTRACT
We acquired magnetic resonance images of the brain of an adult Afri-
can elephant, Loxodonta africana, in the axial and parasagittal planes
and produced anatomically labeled images. We quantified the volume of the
whole brain (3,886.7 cm3) and of the neocortical and cerebellar gray and
white matter. The white matter-to-gray matter ratio in the elephant neo-
cortex and cerebellum is in keeping with that expected for a brain of
this size. The ratio of neocortical gray matter volume to corpus
callosum cross-sectional area is similar in the elephant and human
brains (108 and 93.7,respectively), emphasizing the difference between
terrestrial mammals and cetaceans, which have a very small corpus
callosum relative to the volume of neocortical gray matter (ratio of
181–287 in our sample). Finally, the elephant has an unusually large and
convoluted hippocampus compared to primates and especially to cetaceans.
This may be related to the extremely long social and chemical memory of
elephants. [/quote]
www.stanford.edu/~nmpinter/elephant%20cognition%202008.pdf
[quote]The African elephant brain that was examined by magnetic
resonance imaging revealed that the hippocampus is unusually large and
convoluted and proportionately slightly larger in comparison to brain
size than in the human (Hakeem et al., 2005). This observation contrasts
with another report, however, based on dissection of African and Asian
elephant brains, indicating that the hippocampus is somewhat
dispropor-tionately smaller than in the human (Shoshani et al., 2006).
It seems possible that a comparison of brain structures by dissection
could be a little distorted compared with modern imaging techniques
applied to intact brains (Hakeem et al., 2005). Although more definitive
studies are needed, a larger and more complex hippocampus in the
elephant brain than would be predicted by brain size, would be
consistent with the viewpoint that the information processing of the
cerebral cortex in elephants is adaptively biased towards facilitating
long-term, spatial-temporal information acqui-sition and storage.[/quote]
And adding to this copy and paste this last article is critical of
elephant abilities so you might like it more. Enjoy.
Reentrant
Aug 5, 2012, 12:51:18 PM8/5/12
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J. J. Lodder
Aug 5, 2012, 2:34:24 PM8/5/12
to
Now you can de sums on that.
How much energy in food does a killed mammoth yield?
What's the cost of raising a a baby hunter to a mature hunter?
The outcome is that (despite Hollywood myth)
mammoth hunters must have been very competent at it.
Losing only one hunter/hundred mammoths killed
would have been a prohibitively high loss.
Jan
*Hemidactylus*
Aug 5, 2012, 5:23:54 PM8/5/12
to
*Hemidactylus*
Aug 5, 2012, 8:17:13 PM8/5/12
to
to imagine what it is like for such animals in captivity. Bradshaw does
not paint a very pretty picture in _Elephants on the Edge_. Infanticide
seems to be not uncommon amongst captive mothers. One has to wonder if
they are trying to save their young from suffering their own tragic plight.
But getting back to the theme of warfare, seems humans have had use for
war elephants in the past:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant
Steven L.
Aug 6, 2012, 10:23:01 AM8/6/12
to
On 8/4/2012 10:36 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe?
They would have had to have made their move before hominids tamed fire,
> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> versus tribe?
which is what gave hominids a decisive advantage.
And given that even our own civilization can't seem to look ahead more
than about 20 years (cf. the Missouri Compromise, the Treaty of
Versailles, etc.), it's not likely that elephants could have foreseen
where hominids were headed.
Heck, *hominids* could not have foreseen where they were heading. Do
you really think that a Homo Ergaster chief said to his tribe: "Men, we
gotta figure out how to tame fire, so that someday we can take over this
planet!"
--
Steven L.
*Hemidactylus*
Aug 7, 2012, 9:05:44 AM8/7/12
to
acquisitions highly fortuitous. There's no crystal ball. Even if
elephant could anticipate our threat, they were probably outmatched.
Elephants are herbivores so didn't adapt in the mode of a predator. Thus
they are at some disadvantage against species that can hunt, like lions
or humans. But do lions take on full grown adults or the young? And
humans need weapons and strength in numbers. Now we have helicopters and
snipers. And we have instruments to inflict pain to put them in their
place and ways of restraining them, since we are superior and it is our
prerogative to view them in a circus or zoo.
The main disadvantage for elephants would be their ivory tusks. That
became a serious liability they could not have anticipated.
Perseus
Aug 12, 2012, 6:46:26 AM8/12/12
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Perseus
Ron O
Aug 12, 2012, 10:15:36 AM8/12/12
to
intelligent and they are big. Like us they have the ability to
destroy their ecosystems, but they aren't smart enough or haven't
developed the technology to allow the levels of ecological destruction
that humans have maintained. As large animals they require a lot of
food. If they become too successful their population crashes.
Elephant civilizations would be difficult to maintain. Smaller
populations would have to generate the intellectual advances before
the area was depleted. They have to keep moving before any single
area is depleted so badly that it isn't useful to them when they next
need it in their nomadic lifestyle.
Ron Okimoto
Ron O
Aug 12, 2012, 10:01:30 AM8/12/12
to
On Aug 5, 9:45�am, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/05/2012 08:47 AM, Ron O wrote:
>
> > On Aug 4, 9:36 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> >> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> >> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> >> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> >> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> >> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
> >> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
>
> > They haven't done that to lions and hyenas so the answer is likely no.
>
> Is it because they are too dependent on one leader to make decisions for
> the herd? The knowledge this leader (the matriarch) possesses could make
> one herd more successful than the other and determine how elephants deal
> with threats like lions:
>
> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/15/older-e...
> On 08/05/2012 08:47 AM, Ron O wrote:
>
> > On Aug 4, 9:36 pm, *Hemidactylus* <ecpho...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> If elephants had realized long ago what an eventual threat to them
> >> humans would become, could they have outmatched us at a time early in
> >> our natural history and acted to literally stomp us into oblivion, herd
> >> versus tribe? Could they have developed strategies to hunt and destroy
> >> us and used their infrasonic or seismic means of communication to
> >> coordinate seek and destroy attacks on humans? Long ago we lacked
> >> elephant guns as tools of carnage:
>
> > They haven't done that to lions and hyenas so the answer is likely no.
>
> Is it because they are too dependent on one leader to make decisions for
> the herd? The knowledge this leader (the matriarch) possesses could make
> one herd more successful than the other and determine how elephants deal
> with threats like lions:
>
I've thought about this and I don't know and can't come up with
something to tilt the balance in one direction or the other. Our
immediate ape relatives (chimps and gorillas) have leaders and so do
we. I don't know if it made us into what we are or not. In most ways
it likely depresses intellectual growth of the group as a whole.
Sheep have bellwethers, dogs, naked mole rats etc and they haven't
advance as much. Having alpha individuals is a common behavioral
trait in many species. One thing a cultural hierarchy may have
allowed is for division of labor and levels of society where brains
could be nurtured and benefit the whole. Wolves and elephants were
never able to take advantage of that type of social stratification,
but I don't know how or if it factored into our ancestors when our
brains were developing, say, 2 million years ago. By the time
Neandertals existed we were taking care of our sick and injured and
obviously sharing resources for the good of the group, but when did
that start? I think that chimps are on the verge of making that leap,
and it might have happened with the Australopithicines or Homo
habalines.
Ron Okimoto
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