Ivory centuries
Arab and Atlantic trades
Tusks left Africa before any park existed.
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
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