New fossil remains of Elephas from the southern Levant: Implications for the evolutionary history of the Asian elephant Adrian M. Lister a, ⁎, Wendy Dirks b , Amnon Assaf c , Michael Chazan d , Paul Goldberg e,h , Yaakov H. Applbaum f , Nathalie Greenbaum f , Liora Kolska Horwitz g a Earth Sciences Department, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK b Centre for Oral Health Research, School of Dental Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 4BW, UK c Prehistoric Man Museum, Kibbutz Ma'ayan Baruch, Israel d Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, 19 Russell St., Toronto, ONT M5S 2S2, Canada e Department of Archaeology, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215, USA f Department of Radiology, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem 91230, Israel g National Natural History Collections, Faculty of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel h Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans (ROCEEH), Rümelinstr. 23, D-72070 Tübingen, Germany abstract article info Article history: Received 11 February 2013 Received in revised form 3 May 2013 Accepted 5 May 2013 Available online 20 May 2013 Keywords: Elephas hysudricus Elephas maximus Asian elephant 'Ain Soda (Jordan) Ma'ayan Baruch (Israel) Middle Pleistocene We describe new fossil remains of elephant (Elephas cf. hysudricus) from archaeological sites in the Levant: Ma'ayan Baruch (Israel) and 'Ain Soda (Jordan). Both sites date to the Middle Pleistocene based on stone ar- tefacts typical of Levantine Late Acheulian assemblages. The elephant remains show ‘primitive’ dental fea- tures reminiscent of E. hysudricus from the Plio-Pleistocene of the Siwaliks (northern India), the species thought to be ancestral to Asian elephant E. maximus. Regionally, the new fossils are chronologically interme- diate between an earlier (ca. 1 Ma) record of Elephas sp. from Evron Quarry (Israel), and Holocene remains of E. maximus from archaeological sites in NW Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. It is unclear at present whether this represents continuity of occupation or, more plausibly, independent westward expansions. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The ancestry of the living Asian elephant Elephas maximus L. is poorly understood. While the generic name Elephas was formerly applied to many different kinds of fossil elephant, only a few fossil species are now included within Elephas sensu stricto (Maglio, 1973). Of these, the Pleistocene species E. hysudricus of the Indian subcontinent and E. hysudrindicus of SE Asia are clearly, from their morphology, closest to the ancestry of the living species. However, the history of these species, their temporal and geographical extent, and the mode of transformation of one or both of them into the mod- ern species, are poorly known. Elephas maximus is today restricted to the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia. In historical times, however, its range extended eastward to the Pacific coast of China, and westward to the Levant (Shoshani and Eisenberg, 1982; Sukumar, 2012). Until recently, earlier fossil evidence of Elephas s.s. in the western extremity of the distribution was restricted to an Early Pleistocene molar from Evron Quarry (Israel), referred to Elephas sp. by Tchernov et al. (1994). This article describes new fossil remains from the Levant that are referable to Elephas and are of Middle Pleistocene age: two elephant teeth found at Ma'ayan Baruch (Israel), and three partial molars from 'Ain Soda (Jordan). Other Elephas specimens from the region are revised, and the place of all of this material in the evolutionary history of the genus is assessed. 2. Materials 2.1. Ma'ayan Baruch The Late Acheulian locality of Ma'ayan Baruch is a large, open-air site at the northern end of the Hula Valley (Israel) (Fig. 1). The locality comprises numerous small find spots as well as three dense concen- trations of lithic artefacts that were exposed by ploughing in the ‘Hamara’ fields of Kibbutz Ma'ayan Baruch. The artefacts lie within and on top of a terra rossa soil. Since the 1960s, some 8000 artefacts, predominantly handaxes, have been collected from an area of ca. 0.3 km 2 (Stekelis and Gilead, 1966; Gilead, 1977; Ronen et al., 1980; Grosman et al., 2008). The ‘Hamara’ find locality has yielded a few bone (probably proboscidean) and tusk fragments (Stekelis and Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 386 (2013) 119–130 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 207 942 5398. E-mail address: A.Lister@nhm.ac.uk (A.M. Lister). 0031-0182/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.05.013 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/palaeo