Tracing the Source of the Elephant And Hippopotamus Ivory from ...

elephants show a lower preference for grasses compared to the African elephant (see
Miller 1986: 32-33, and Sukumar et al. 1987:11). He correctly states that a mixture of
woodland and grassland is the optimum environment for elephants, and that habitat
change (from forest to savanna) promotes a decline in elephant populations (Miller 1986:
32). While I agree that the environment influences the size of elephant populations, and
that less than optimum conditions may explain the theoretically small size of the Syrian
elephant population, he may nevertheless be placing too much emphasis on
environmental determinism, particularly in his focus on optimization. Elephants, unlike
hippopotami, are able to exploit a great variety of environments, as shown in Chapter
Eight and particularly by the findings of Viljoen (1988).
In the end, Miller reconstructs the geographic range of the Syrian elephant as
including the mountainous forested areas of northwest Syria and southern Turkey (which
has the optimal 500 mm annual rainfall). Here the Syrian elephant could have seasonally
exploited the high quality (high protein) browse available in the arid steppe between the
Orontes and the Euphrates, as well as the area of Lake Jabbul, and the Hama steppe
stretching across to below the bend of the Euphrates southeast of Aleppo (Miller 1986:
30, see Figure 24 below).
Miller then ties all of this up beautifully by establishing an inverse relationship
between the elephant populations and human population density; a relationship which is
furthermore exacerbated by human induced deforestation (see also Yasuda et al. 2000).
During this time the advances in metal-working required more fuel, and population
increases lent the way for more pasture and agricultural zones to be established. All of
Miller’s argument makes perfect sense but I presume that the situation for the Syrian
52