Resolving the Mystery of Ptolemy's War Elephants

[SDM]

This may be useful for the game, but I rather create an off-topic thread so that Off-Topic can be a repository for scholarly research and studies.

Below is an excerpt of the full article. It seems that Ptolemy IV's war elephants are inbred African Savannah Elephants.

Until now, the main question remained: Did Ptolemy employ African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) or African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) in the Battle or Raphia?

“Using three different markers, we established that the Eritrean elephants are actually savanna elephants,” said Adam Brandt, a doctoral candidate in Roca’s laboratory and first author of the paper. “Their DNA was very similar to neighboring populations of East African savanna elephants but with very low genetic diversity, which was expected for such a small, isolated population.”

The markers also revealed that these Eritrean elephants have no genetic ties to forest or Asian elephants, as other authorities have suggested.

For the full article, see the source below:

http://www.igb.illinois.edu/news/war-elephant-myths-debunked-dna

[Prodigal Son]

There are also claims (not sure if there are also facts on this) that there were a larger sub-species of indian elephants used in war, now extinct, even larger than the biggest african elephants. So elephant size and power is a tricky one to balance. Since ptolemaic elephants flead before the seleucid ones anyway, most likely would be (ranked by size):

1) Seleucid/Mauryan Indian Elephants

2) Ptolemaic African Elephants

3) Carthaginian (Forest) African Elephants