Opinion When elephants crossed the Alps, and a fossil that may tell their story

Confronting the elephant in the room can be a good way to get trampled. For 15 years, the Carthaginian general, Hannibal Barca, was the elephant in the peninsula for the Romans. He had invaded Italy by crossing the Alps with an army that included elephants. He rampaged across the peninsula; the Romans learnt not to fight him directly as it only brought devastating defeat, but he didn’t have the resources to attack Rome, either. Fabius Maximus, the leader who pioneered the Romans’ attritional strategy, became known as Cunctator (“the delayer”). That delay allowed them to bounce back and win — sometimes, you need the patience of an elephant.

Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps in 218 BCE passed into legend as a nigh-impossible feat, and many over the millennia have speculated about the route he took and how exactly he got his army across — particularly the elephants. Now, a cube-shaped bone excavated in Córdoba, Spain in 2020, has been identified as part of an elephant’s foot and dated to the third or fourth century BCE. Found together with ancient artillery projectiles, it’s possible that the bone belonged to a Carthaginian war elephant, perhaps even one of Hannibal’s that died on the way to Italy.

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Hannibal’s elephants apparently didn’t make a mark in the battles that followed — perhaps they did not survive long enough. But it was the very image of the great beasts crossing the Alps that immortalised them in memory; this study has called them “mythical specimens”. Much like the 19th-century “discovery” of Troy, when archaeology is interpreted as confirming myth, it can cause great excitement. Perhaps only the elephants remember the truth.