Ivory from a 16th century shipwreck reveals new details about African elephants
Dozens of tusks from a sunken Portuguese trading ship have now been analyzed
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.
The new results, reported in the Feb. 8 Current Biology, give insight into historical African elephant populations and ivory trade networks.
For having been lost at sea for nearly 500 years, the Bom Jesus’ ivory is incredibly well-preserved, says Alida de Flamingh, a molecular biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “When the ship sank, the copper and lead ingots [stored above the tusks] kind of pushed the ivory down into the seabed,” protecting the tusks from scattering and erosion. A frigid ocean current also runs through this region of the Atlantic. “That really cold current probably helped preserve the DNA that was in the tusks,” de Flamingh says.