--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, ND <nmd65@...> wrote:
> Egyptian tomb paintings depecting the "Keftiu"
> often show them carrying elephant-tusks as tribute,
> and there are Egyptian texts that state that elephants
> are found in Keftiu. Of course, these animals never
> had a home in Crete.
*********
Elephants certainly did live on Crete and other Eastern
Mediterranean islands during the Pleistocene. At least one
authority suggests that they survived into the Holocene and
specifically long enough to be exported to Egypt.
See :
http://www.cq.rm.cnr.it/elephants2001/pdf/402_406.pdf
Did endemic dwarf elephants survive on Mediterranean islands up to
protohistorical times?
M. Masseti
Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e Genetica `Leo Pardi'
dell'Università di Firenze.Laboratori di Antropologia,
Firenze,
Italy
SUMMARY: The wall paintings of the 18thDynasty tomb of
Rekh-mi-Re¯,
vizier of Thutmosis III, at Thebes(Egypt) show, among other figures,
that of a small-sized elephant borne by the Syrian tributaries as a
gift tothe Egyptian pharaoh. It has been observed that this
proboscidean cannot be an immature specimen in viewof its large
tusks, and that it could be referred to the Asiatic elephant, which
seems to have lived in historicaltimes in the western Near East.
But, in the light of archaeological and paleontological evidence, it
cannot be excluded that the elephant depicted in the Rekh-mi-R tomb
could also represent a dwarf proboscidean,possibly imported to Egypt
from somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean islands where endemic
dwarf elephants might still have survived up to protohistorical
times.