ARCHAEOLOGICAL evidence tells us that Neolithic Stone Age hunters, about 12 000 years ago, would occasionally get lucky and bring down a woolly mammoth.
The meat would have kept the clan going for a long time, but they also made use of the ivory for both carving and shelter construction.
There were ivory carvers in Egypt some 10 000 years ago, long before the pharaohs, and ivory was valued and used by early civilisations across the Middle East, in India and China and later by the Greeks and the Romans.
Fast forward to the 16th century and the beginnings of European colonisation in Africa.
First in West Africa then East Africa, European and later American hunters were kept busy supplying the growing demand for ivory in Europe and then America.
Ivory was used for piano keys, billiard balls, hairbrushes and so much else.
As a result elephant populations began to crash.
Interestingly, the global ivory market peaked just before the First World War and then crashed until the 1930s when it began to pick up again.
It reached an all-time peak in the late 1980s and then CITES (Convention on International Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora) stepped in, upgrading all elephants to Appendix One and effectively introducing a ban on the global ivory trade.
The trade promptly collapsed.
Because they had well-managed elephant populations, elephants were downgraded to Appendix Two in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe in 1997.
In 2000 South Africa followed suit.
There were one-off ivory sales by the first group in 1999, to be joined by South Africa in 2008.
For various reasons, but mainly because of the growing prosperity of the populations of China and Vietnam, the illegal ivory trade and poaching is burgeoning again.
In the past decade savanna elephant populations in Africa have fallen by 30 percent and forest elephants by 65 percent.
Today, in the frozen wastes of far eastern Russia a new industry is burgeoning.
They are called tuskers, desperately poor Siberians trying to make a living are digging out ancient mammoth ivory and woolly rhinoceros horn from the frozen tundra.
Both species died out about 10 000 years ago, but their remains have been remarkably well preserved in the frozen mud of Siberia.
Far from any towns or effective policing, the tuskers are selling eons old mammoth ivory and woolly rhinoceros horn to ‘agents’ who just happen to have the cash available.
The huge mammoth tusks are fetching up to R8 000 a kilogramme and the woolly rhino horns over R80 000 a kilogramme – the ivory is headed for the Chinese market and the horn for the Vietnamese traditional medicine market.
Full circle indeed, from Stone Age subsistence hunting to 21st century human greed and blind superstition.
The ancient woolly mammoths and rhinos seemed doomed all over again.
But now the good news.
China has announced that all commercial trade in ivory will be banned and closed down by the end of this year, following a similar announcement by the United States last year.
China is the world’s biggest ivory market and the US the second biggest, so this can only be very good news for the world’s elephants.
Sources: Save the Elephants News Service and The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Elephants, Salamander Books, London, 1991.
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