Elephant civilization?

Jonathan Edelstein

Jonathan Edelstein

Elephants would seem to be at the top of any list of non-primate candidates for civilization. They're intelligent and cooperative; they are one of a very few non-human animals to engage in ritualized behavior such as mourning the dead; they have a "vocabulary" of more than 200 calls and tactile signals; they're long-lived enough to develop a large fund of life experience; and, because young elephants must be taught to live in the herd, they have developed means of cultural transmission. All that's missing, really, is the capacity for true language.

Imagine, then, a species of elephants that has evolved language-processing centers equivalent to what humans have, and has developed an oral literature and a capacity for imagination and spirituality. We'll assume humans don't evolve, in order to prevent this thread from being ASB.

What would the *elephants' culture be like? I can think of a few basic factors:

  • Elephant herds are matriarchal - females raise the infants and act as cultural transmitters, while males leave the herd at puberty and either become solitary or join loose-knit "bachelor herds." Presumably the *elephants' tribal structure would reflect this - there might even be separate male and female tribes, with the females providing the cultural continuity.

  • Elephants are herbivores and their diet consists mostly of low-energy foods, meaning that they must eat huge amounts and move around frequently. This would limit any elephant civilization to small nomadic tribes, possibly with periodic meetings for cultural and genetic cross-fertilization. They might possibly learn to cultivate higher-energy foods such as legumes, but agriculture seems like a bigger leap for them than for humans, so they might never progress beyond the tribal level.

  • What do they use for hands? Trunks are prehensile, and elephants can make and use simple tools with them, but they aren't nearly as useful for fine manipulation as human hands. Maybe the *elephants' evolutionary package should include modifications to the trunk to enable delicate manipulation of objects. But even so, each elephant would only have one, meaning that many operations would require two or more elephants to perform, which might accentuate the cooperative aspects of their behavior. I'd expect the females to be better tool-makers than males, resulting in groups of solitary males or small bachelor herds that depend on the local female tribe - but in a herbivore culture where the males aren't needed for hunting, what do they provide in return? Scouting and defense, maybe?
Any other thoughts about how a culture of civilized elephants might develop?
 

Maxwell Edison II

Have you read "footfall" by Niven and Pournelle?

The Fí are very similar to small elephants, except that their trunks branch out into four subdivisions, making the manipulation of objects far easier.
 

krinsbez

Jonathan Edelstein said:
  • What do they use for hands? Trunks are prehensile, and elephants can make and use simple tools with them, but they aren't nearly as useful for fine manipulation as human hands. Maybe the *elephants' evolutionary package should include modifications to the trunk to enable delicate manipulation of objects. But even so, each elephant would only have one, meaning that many operations would require two or more elephants to perform, which might accentuate the cooperative aspects of their behavior. I'd expect the females to be better tool-makers than males, resulting in groups of solitary males or small bachelor herds that depend on the local female tribe - but in a herbivore culture where the males aren't needed for hunting, what do they provide in return? Scouting and defense, maybe?
Click to expand...
I presume you mean, "asides from sex", yes? Hmm, in addition to the suggested, perhaps males become the poets and philosophers of *elephant society, while females take care of the practicalities of life?
 

twovultures

Donor
I've actually thought of this for a fantasy setting I wanted to write.

In this setting, the elephants have discovered fire and farming, and fuel their brains by growing fruit orchards and high-calorie root vegetables, so they're not nomadic.

Elephant society is arranged with a 'matriarch's village', a large central village where all the females live with their daughters and the younger males. The older males live in smaller bachelor villages in the 'orbit' of the matriarch's village, living separate lives until they go into musth and return to the matriarch village to find a mate. If a female chooses him, they go and live in solitude for a few weeks, and then go their separate ways.

The matriarch doesn't govern the day to day lives of the males, but she can summon them to fight war. Once war is declared, however, the armies are commanded by the elder bulls.

To help overcome the tool problem, I decreed that the sentient elephants have a 3 appendages at the end of their trunks to manipulate objects (as opposed to Asian elephants who have one appendage, and African elephants who have 2). They still have to coordinate together to build tools, or have humans do the work for them.
 

zoomar

For a while, I've been working on a TL with intelligent elephants that evolved in a New World never occupied by humans. In my TL, these creatures:

Are somewhat smaller than modern elephants (about the size of a water buffalo) and have lost most of their hair (evolved from mammoths)

Have split trunks with "fingers" similar to Niven and Pournell's "Footfal"l aliens

Live in a strongly matrarchial society in which only females are truly social. The matriarchies are competitive and territorial

Males are not as intelligent and asocial are allowed to roam "wild" except when herded for mating purposes. Certain males are also bred as warbeasts

Matriarchs are all ranked based on presumed (actual) decent from a mythical common mother

Each matriarchy lives in a large settlement formed of mounded solidified dung with "residential" wallows. Internal heat is provided by the decomposing dung.

Limited technology, use of wood and vegetal material for tools primarily. Also primitive breeding technology to create living tools.

Communication primarily oral - many signals below sound of human hearing

Some primtiive writing, but most "history" is maintained by a sort of racial memory
 
Thande

Thande

Donor
Maxwell Edison II said:
Have you read "footfall" by Niven and Pournelle?

The Fí are very similar to small elephants, except that their trunks branch out into four subdivisions, making the manipulation of objects far easier.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough I'm reading that for the first time at the moment and I was just going to bring it up. Though the plural is Fithp.
 
Jonathan Edelstein

Jonathan Edelstein

krinsbez said:
I presume you mean, "asides from sex", yes? Hmm, in addition to the suggested, perhaps males become the poets and philosophers of *elephant society, while females take care of the practicalities of life?
Click to expand...

Actually I didn't - sex is a mutual exchange, and given that the males are the ones that go into musth, it's something that they want urgently and the females can provide rather than vice versa.

The idea of males being the poets and philosophers is an interesting one, though - the females are the cultural transmitters, but they might focus on the teaching stories and the skills the children need to learn while the solitary males contemplate the metaphysical. Exposure to metaphysics might be a further stage of the males' education that begins when they leave the herd - I could imagine some kind of "vision-quest" initiation for post-pubescent males.

Sian said:
too ASB not to be in ASB ...
Click to expand...

No ASB intervention is required, just a random mutation in African elephants between two and five million years ago.

My understanding of the forum rules is that alternate-evolution PODs only go in ASB if the ATL species coexists with humans. I've seen several threads in pre-1900 that are similar to this one.

twovultures said:
In this setting, the elephants have discovered fire and farming, and fuel their brains by growing fruit orchards and high-calorie root vegetables, so they're not nomadic.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. I did a quick search for African elephants' daily calorie needs (anyone who has more authoritative figures is welcome to provide them) and saw figures ranging from 40,000 to 70,000. This means that one *elephant farmer needs as much land as 20 to 35 people. It's doable for small communities, especially since the *elephants can be their own draft animals, but I doubt the village populations would rise much over 100. Maybe, if the culture grows beyond the tribal stage, several tributary villages could support a capital with a population of 1000, which would be equivalent in human terms to a large Bronze Age city.

Fire shouldn't be a problem - the *elephants would discover how to use and control it the same way humans did.

twovultures said:
Elephant society is arranged with a 'matriarch's village', a large central village where all the females live with their daughters and the younger males. The older males live in smaller bachelor villages in the 'orbit' of the matriarch's village, living separate lives until they go into musth and return to the matriarch village to find a mate. If a female chooses him, they go and live in solitude for a few weeks, and then go their separate ways.

The matriarch doesn't govern the day to day lives of the males, but she can summon them to fight war. Once war is declared, however, the armies are commanded by the elder bulls.
Click to expand...

This seems reasonable (although the matriarchs would probably limit the number of males in musth who can be in the central village at any given time). I'd expect that the bachelor villages will trade with the central village, or possibly that they would receive an allowance of tools in exchange for gathering, scouting and defense of the settlement.

twovultures said:
To help overcome the tool problem, I decreed that the sentient elephants have a 3 appendages at the end of their trunks to manipulate objects (as opposed to Asian elephants who have one appendage, and African elephants who have 2).
Click to expand...

This could be part of the original mutation, and also makes African elephants more plausible as the seed stock.

zoomar said:
For a while, I've been working on a TL with intelligent elephants that evolved in a New World never occupied by humans. In my TL, these creatures:

Are somewhat smaller than modern elephants (about the size of a water buffalo) and have lost most of their hair (evolved from mammoths)
Click to expand...

This is interesting but I'm looking for a species that is behaviorally similar to African and Asian elephants, which it isn't clear that mammoths were.

zoomar said:
Live in a strongly matrarchial society in which only females are truly social. The matriarchies are competitive and territorial
Click to expand...

Hmmm, how territorial are elephant herds in OTL? The females would definitely be more social than the males - they're biologically designed for sociability and cultural transmission, whereas the males have traits (such as the above-mentioned musth) that are positive drawbacks to settled society.

I like your ideas about technology and communication, although I'd expect their language to be tactile as well as oral (it is believed that OTL elephants communicate partially by means of seismic vibrations).
 

Admiral Matt

Jonathan Edelstein said:
No ASB intervention is required, just a random mutation in African elephants between two and five million years ago.

My understanding of the forum rules is that alternate-evolution PODs only go in ASB if the ATL species coexists with humans. I've seen several threads in pre-1900 that are similar to this one.
Click to expand...

That's fine, but random mutations are single shifts, they don't come in sets like superpowers. An elephant gene that bumps up vocabulary by more than an order of magnitude is plausible. There is a similar gene in some border collies. But positing that the same mutation does much of anything else - especially structural differences like a trunk with more pseudo digits - that's functionally identical to the reasoning in X-men.

Hmmm. I did a quick search for African elephants' daily calorie needs (anyone who has more authoritative figures is welcome to provide them) and saw figures ranging from 40,000 to 70,000. This means that one *elephant farmer needs as much land as 20 to 35 people. It's doable for small communities, especially since the *elephants can be their own draft animals, but I doubt the village populations would rise much over 100. Maybe, if the culture grows beyond the tribal stage, several tributary villages could support a capital with a population of 1000, which would be equivalent in human terms to a large Bronze Age city.

Fire shouldn't be a problem - the *elephants would discover how to use and control it the same way humans did.

This could be part of the original mutation, and also makes African elephants more plausible as the seed stock.

This is interesting but I'm looking for a species that is behaviorally similar to African and Asian elephants, which it isn't clear that mammoths were.
Click to expand...

Why not? Elephants were incredibly successful, and doubly so for a large animal, colonizing five continents and a massive range of environments. At POD, they'd been more successful than anything of comparable size, as well as many smaller megafauna (big cats, camels, maybe bears). To me that implies they shared the strengths of their surviving relatives to one degree or another. Is there reason to believe they lacked something the moderns have?

I like your ideas about technology and communication, although I'd expect their language to be tactile as well as oral (it is believed that OTL elephants communicate partially by means of seismic vibrations).
Click to expand...

That would certainly make communication in a crowd difficult. Aside from being awesome.
 
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Sicarius

Has anyone ever done a top tier (you know what I mean, Decades of Darkness, Fight and Be Right style stuff) AH timeline about a nonhuman intelligence and civilization developing in conjunction with man?
 
iori

iori

One big thing is that as a civilization they'd develop more spread out, as Elephants can communicate overy very long distances using Infrasonic waves in the ground.

Of course this assumes they don't have a civilization as it is and we're to anthrocentric to realize it. ;)
 

The Uchronian

Jonathan Edelstein said:
Elephants would seem to be at the top of any list of non-primate candidates for civilization. They're intelligent and cooperative; they are one of a very few non-human animals to engage in ritualized behavior such as mourning the dead; they have a "vocabulary" of more than 200 calls and tactile signals; they're long-lived enough to develop a large fund of life experience; and, because young elephants must be taught to live in the herd, they have developed means of cultural transmission. All that's missing, really, is the capacity for true language.

Imagine, then, a species of elephants that has evolved language-processing centers equivalent to what humans have, and has developed an oral literature and a capacity for imagination and spirituality. We'll assume humans don't evolve, in order to prevent this thread from being ASB.

What would the *elephants' culture be like? I can think of a few basic factors:

  • Elephant herds are matriarchal - females raise the infants and act as cultural transmitters, while males leave the herd at puberty and either become solitary or join loose-knit "bachelor herds." Presumably the *elephants' tribal structure would reflect this - there might even be separate male and female tribes, with the females providing the cultural continuity.

  • Elephants are herbivores and their diet consists mostly of low-energy foods, meaning that they must eat huge amounts and move around frequently. This would limit any elephant civilization to small nomadic tribes, possibly with periodic meetings for cultural and genetic cross-fertilization. They might possibly learn to cultivate higher-energy foods such as legumes, but agriculture seems like a bigger leap for them than for humans, so they might never progress beyond the tribal level.

  • What do they use for hands? Trunks are prehensile, and elephants can make and use simple tools with them, but they aren't nearly as useful for fine manipulation as human hands. Maybe the *elephants' evolutionary package should include modifications to the trunk to enable delicate manipulation of objects. But even so, each elephant would only have one, meaning that many operations would require two or more elephants to perform, which might accentuate the cooperative aspects of their behavior. I'd expect the females to be better tool-makers than males, resulting in groups of solitary males or small bachelor herds that depend on the local female tribe - but in a herbivore culture where the males aren't needed for hunting, what do they provide in return? Scouting and defense, maybe?
Any other thoughts about how a culture of civilized elephants might develop?
Click to expand...

Oh, I dunno, man, we ain't primates and we made it to the top. :p Also, this reminds me of those Indian elephants in the Jungle Book, British accents and all :D

All good-natured ribbing & and joking aside, this might actually be an interesting project if someone wanted to try it. I can imagine that intelligent, sapients elephants could potentially form societies not unlike that of many of the nomadic Native American, Turkic and Mongolic tribes IOTL........
 
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