Ivory centuries
Arab and Atlantic trades
Tusks left Africa before any park existed.
Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Amboseli project starts
- Douglas-Hamilton continent count
- CITES ivory ban
- Kruger culling pause
- One-off ivory sales
- Tanzania/Mozambique poaching wave
- US and China domestic steps
- IUCN split assessments
- China ivory ban era
- Human-elephant conflict years
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed36
Intelligence91
Range43
Resilience17
Cultural impact79
Ecological role97
LessMore
Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Why bush elephant, not African elephant in general?
The taxonomy wiki is African bush elephant. Forest elephants (L. cyclotis) were widely recognised as a separate EN/CR story in the 2021 IUCN assessments.
What did the 1989 ivory ban do?
It collapsed legal international commercial trade. Domestic markets, stockpiles and later one-off sales (2008) kept the argument alive. Poaching did not end in 1989.
Who is Cynthia Moss in this file?
Amboseli Elephant Research Project since 1972 -- matrilines with names and decades of calves, the opposite of an anonymous ivory graph.
Are elephants the highest ecological-role score for a reason?
They open woodland, dig water, disperse seeds and rewrite fire. In this 24-type atlas that engineer role outranks even wolves and whales.
What is musth?
A periodic male state with urine dribble, temporal secretion and aggression. It is physiology, not a mood.
Did Kruger culling end?
Large-scale culling paused in the 1990s. Contraception, range expansion and later density debates replaced it without a final peace.
IUCN: Endangered (2021)
The african bush elephant did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.
This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.
Where it began
Pliocene LoxodontaAfrican savannas and woodlands
Timeline
1972Amboseli project starts
Cynthia Moss begins the named-matriarch series that still runs.
1979Douglas-Hamilton continent count
An early aerial synthesis that made decline a number, not a rumour.
1989CITES ivory ban
Commercial international trade shut; stockpiles became the next fight.
1995Kruger culling pause
South Africa halted routine culling as contraception and ethics arguments rose.
2008One-off ivory sales
CITES allowed limited southern African stockpile sales -- a still-cited fracture.
2010sTanzania/Mozambique poaching wave
Selous and Niassa losses reset the post-ban optimism.
2016US and China domestic steps
Major market closures followed the poaching decade.
2021IUCN split assessments
Savanna EN, forest CR -- the two-species Red List.
2021China ivory ban era
Domestic market closure after 2017 still being measured in seizures.
2023Human-elephant conflict years
Crop-raid killings outrank ivory in some East African local news.
The eras
1972-89
Named and then banned
Amboseli science met a CITES gavel.
1990s
Cull vs pill
Kruger density ethics replaced routine shooting in policy talk.
2008-16
Sales and a new wave
One-off legal ivory and a poaching spike shared a decade.
2021-
Two species on paper
EN/CR split and conflict, not only ivory, lead the file.
Milestones
Amboseli names
1972-A population became a genealogy.
CITES ban
1989The year ivory lost its main legal ocean.
IUCN split
2021Bush and forest elephants stopped sharing one card.
Reading african bush elephant history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.
Keep exploring
More in Wildlife
🐅
Tiger
Asia largest cat — subspecies maps, 1973 Project Tiger, and roughly 4,000 remaining wild animals still frame a century of recovery arithmetic.
Overall 62 🦁Lion
A social pantherine whose prides, Gir relic and 2015 Cecil killing still structure African conservation politics.
Overall 66 🐺Gray wolf
A Holarctic pack hunter whose 1995 Yellowstone return and older Leopold ethics still structure predator politics.
Overall 78 🐼Giant panda
A bamboo specialist whose WWF logo, Wolong quake and 2016 IUCN downlist from EN to VU made a recovery into a brand.
Overall 41 🐻Polar bear
A marine bear whose seal-and-ice budget made Churchill, Knut and climate models into one public animal.
Overall 56 🦍Gorilla
The atlas type is the western gorilla -- a knuckle-walking ape whose Fossey-era mountain cousins and Koko lab fame split one public name.
Overall 45 🐋Blue whale
The largest animal whose 1966 IWC protection, 1982 moratorium and still-thin Antarctic recovery define a hunted giant.
Overall 65