Is this small, tusked, apparently furry creature depicted on the wall of an Egyptian tomb really a pygmy mammoth? Palaeozoologist and science blogger Darren Naish explains where this idea came from, what other explanations exist, and why we’ll probably never know the truth.

Inspired by the then-new discovery that a dwarfed population* of Woolly mammoths Mammuthus primigenius were still living as recently as 3700 years ago (albeit on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic: Vartanyan et al. (1993), Guthrie (2004)), Rosen (1994) made the tentative suggestion that the elephant shown in Rekhmire’s tomb might actually be a dwarf Woolly mammoth. If true, this would have radical implications. It would mean that the ancient Egyptians had a trading link of sorts with far eastern Siberia, and also that mammoths were captured and then transported alive to Africa!

As you may already have guessed, there is [another] possibility: this being that Rekhmire’s elephant is neither a Siberian mammoth nor a wrongly-scaled ‘symbolic’ elephant, but perhaps a depiction of one of the pygmy Mediterranean island-dwelling species.

Most of the dwarf Mediterranean elephants were Pleistocene animals that were long gone by the time of the Pharoahs, but Masseti (2001) noted that a population of dwarfed elephants seem to have lingered on in isolation on the Greek island of Tilos.

Radiocarbon dating of the Tilos dwarf elephants apparently puts some of them as recent as about 4300 years old (+/- 600 years), meaning that they overlapped with the presence of Bronze Age people on the island (Masseti 2001). The remote possibility exists, therefore, that Tilos elephants were captured by ancient Aegeans and then traded between Aegeans, Near Eastern people, and Egyptians – in fact, known trade did occur between these regions during the late Bronze Age at least.

Via Ed Yong