Related: "Single bone in Spain offers first direct evidence of Hannibal's war elephants" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917005 06-feb-2026 40 comments

I have heard this for a long time, and always wondered how they trained African elephants.

There's a reason that you see working elephants all over East Asia, but not in Africa.

African elephants are pretty badass. I have not heard of them being successfully trained, but then, it's never really been a subject I studied.

Also, as we are learning, more and more, when it comes to war, big is not necessarily better. Big targets. These days, a speedboat with a missile, could take out an aircraft carrier.

It is amazing how much narrative archaeologists construct out of a single poorly preserved bone and radiocarbon dating that happens to conform nicely with a famous historical mystery. One should maintain a healthy skepticism about this sort of claim. There are surely alternative explanations for such "artefacts".

> A second-century Roman mosaic of a war elephant in Tunisia

It is quite interesting to see that the depicted elephant has wrong proportions. This makes one wonder whether the artist who created that mosaic, ever saw an elephant himself.

Everyone should visit Córdoba, Spain once in their life.

At this rate, we're only a few years away from discovering evidence for Herodotus' giant ants.

original title: Archaeologists Unearthed a 2,200-Year-Old Bone. They Say It Could Be the First Direct Evidence of Hannibal’s Legendary War Elephants

And also found ammo for lithoboloi!

It’s incredible that we’re still finding chemical or biological signatures from a logistics operation that happened over 2,000 years ago.

Whether it’s stable isotope analysis of the soil or unique pollen counts, the 'data' is still there in the ground. It really puts our modern digital 'archaeology' (trying to recover a file from a 10-year-old server) into perspective.