"Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used"
I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated.
That would be a highly unusual trajectory.
Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity.
And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
- the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant)
- the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)