Elephas anthropogenus

Abstract

This paper and its accompanying artwork examines the history of our perception of nature based on the example of elephants (Elephas maximus, Loxodonta africana, Loxodonta cyclotis). With the fall of the Roman Empire up until the late Middle Ages, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how these animals actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral, pictorial and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct an elephant, thus, reinventing the image of an actual existing creature. This led, in most cases, to illustrations in which the most characteristic features of elephants – such as trunk and tusks – are still visible, but that otherwise completely deviate from the real appearance and physique of these animals. In this process, zoological knowledge about elephants was overwritten by its cultural significance. Based on a collection of these images I have reconstructed the evolution of the ‘Elephas anthropogenus’, the man made elephant.