"Ivory from a 16th century shipwreck reveals new details" Topic

….about African elephants

"In 2008, miners off the coast of Namibia stumbled upon buried treasure: a sunken Portuguese ship known as the Bom Jesus, which went missing on its way to India in 1533. The trading ship bore a trove of gold and silver coins and other valuable materials. But to a team of archaeologists and biologists, the Bom Jesus' most precious cargo was a haul of more than 100 elephant tusks — the largest archaeological cargo of African ivory ever discovered.

Genetic and chemical analyses have now traced those tusks back to several distinct herds of forest elephants that once roamed West Africa. "It is by far the most detailed and comprehensive attempt to source [archaeological] elephant ivory," says Paul Lane, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge not involved in the work…"
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