Mapping the Elephants of the 19th Century East African Ivory Trade with a Multi-Isotope Approach.

ABSTRACT: East African elephants have been hunted for their ivory for millennia but the nineteenth century witnessed strongly escalating demand from Europe and North America. It has been suggested that one consequence was that by the 1880s elephant herds along the coast had become scarce, and to meet demand, trade caravans trekked farther into interior regions of East Africa, extending the extraction frontier. The steady decimation of elephant populations coupled with the extension of trade networks have also been claimed to have triggered significant ecological and socio-economic changes that left lasting legacies across the region. To explore the feasibility of using an isotopic approach to uncover a 'moving frontier' of elephant extraction, we constructed a baseline isotope data set (δ13C, δ15N,

SUBMITTER: Coutu AN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5070863 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature