Europe isn’t known for its elephants. At least, the three species of elephant that traverse Earth today — the African elephants Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclotis and the Asian elephant Elephas maximus — aren’t famous for wandering through Europe. But not too long ago, the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus lived throughout the continent, leaving a lasting trace on the European terrain.
An April 2025 study in Frontiers in Biogeography takes another look at these extinct herbivores, which were wiped out by human hunting during the last Ice Age between around 50,000 and 34,000 years ago. Recreating their range and reconstructing their habitats, the new study finds that the current climate conditions of Europe could still suit the straight-tusked elephant, that is, if these elephants were actually around today.
Read More: Neanderthals Hunted and Ate Straight-Tusked Elephants
Ancient Elephant Engineers
Current potential distribution of the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) in Europe. The coloring represents the probability of occurrence, with grey indicating “very unlikely” and dark green “very likely.” The black dots mark the fossil finds on which the prediction is based. (Image Credit: Gaiser et al.)
P. antiquus elephants lived in Europe for around 700,000 years, surviving several ice ages before their disappearance.
“Fossil evidence shows that P. antiquus often inhabited open or semi-open habitats with mosaic-like vegetation,” said Manuel Steinbauer, the senior author of the new study and an ecologist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, according to a press release. That’s one of the things that makes them “similar to modern elephants,” he added in the release.
Another similarity is their respective environmental impact. Modern elephants are expert “ecosystem engineers” and tend to shape their surroundings, trimming the vegetation through grazing and leveling the geography through trampling. Throughout their time in Europe, straight-tusked elephants changed their habitats, too, maintaining the thin woodlands and the open terrain that would’ve filled out otherwise.
“In the past, megafauna like the straight-tusked elephant and their regulatory mechanisms — such as grazing — were omnipresent,” said Franka Gaiser, the lead author of the study and another ecologist at the University of Bayreuth, according to the release. “Many European species, particularly plants that thrive in open habitats, likely established in their diversity in Europe because they benefited from these ecological influences.”
Indeed, the landscapes that P. antiquus sustained could still suit many of Europe’s native plants, but could P. antiquus still support those same environments? In other words, could P. antiquus thrive in Europe today if they had not been hunted to extinction?
Read More: Did Humans Hunt the Biggest Animals to Extinction?
A Current Climate for Elephant Landscapers?
Hoping to find out, the authors of the new study looked through previously published papers for fossils of P. antiquus. Assigning specific fossils to specific periods of warm and cool weather, then consulting climate models from those specific periods, the team was able to reconstruct the ranges and habitats of P. antiquus throughout history.
Comparing these historical habitats to the habitats of Europe over the past 50,000 to 34,000 years, the team revealed that straight-tusked elephants could’ve survived to the present, considering climate alone, if human hunting hadn’t wiped them out. The team also revealed that straight-tusked elephants could thrive today, specifically in the flatter areas of Western and Central Europe.
According to the team, the results reveal the shortcomings of traditional conservation strategies in Europe, as these strategies typically attempt to maintain European ecosystems as they are, not as they were.
“Traditional conservation strategies in Europe primarily aim to protect biodiversity by shielding habitats from human activities,” Gaiser said in the release. “However, this strategy alone is unlikely to restore the lost ecological functions of megafauna,” including the sustainable landscaping of the straight-tusked elephant.
It is possible that the reintroduction of extant herbivores, like horses and cattle, into Europe could compensate for the loss of extinct herbivores, like straight-tusked elephants, to an extent. But whether extant megafauna could replace extinct megafauna completely, at least when it comes to their landscaping abilities, isn’t clear. Though only time could tell, it’s entirely possible there is no other species that can shape the European terrain quite like a straight-tusked elephant.
Read More: Which Animals Did Early Humans Mainly Hunt?
Article Sources
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
