Shared heritage: Elephants of the Philippines and Indonesia

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, Philippines – Prehistoric ancestors of one of Indonesia’s Asian elephants once populated the southern Philippines.

Indonesia has two subspecies of the Asian elephant: the Sumatran and Borneo elephants, the latter with prehistoric kin in Mindanao.

The Museo de Oro of Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan has an exhibit of the fossilized bones of a Stegodon, an ancestor of the elephant which lived some 11.6 million years ago to the late Pleistocene period. It was found in Asia and Africa when it was more prevalent than the Asian elephants.

The National Museum corroborated the finds, and identified it as Stegodon Mindanensis, said Luis Ostique, Museum de Oro operations, and administration officer. 

“The fossils included some pieces of the tusk, pieces of rib bones, and fragments of leg bones,” Ostique said.

The fossils were found in Barangay Sinai, Municipality of Laguindingan, Misamis Oriental, some 30 kilometers from Cagayan de Oro in 2010.

Aside from the Stegodon, dwarf elephants were also believed to have lived in the Philippines during the Pleistocene period, specifically in Luzon and Panay, and it is believed that the Stegodon along with other prehistoric mammals entered Mindanao through the land bridge known as the Sunda Shelf and migrated northward.

But the Stegodon and the dwarf elephants eventually became extinct, and it wasn’t until much later that elephants were again found in Mindanao when Bornean elephants were gifted to the sultans of Sulu and Maguindanao by the Sultanate of Java.

Elephants comprise three living species and are the largest living land animals. One species, the Asian elephant – unknown subspecies like those on Sabah – once lived in both the Sultanate of Sulu and Maguindanao. They became extinct in those areas because of hunting, and many were brought back to Sabah.

Two of the four subspecies of Asian elephants are found in Indonesia. The Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) is only found on the island of Sumatra and was originally thought to be the smallest of the Asian elephants.

However, it was discovered in 2005 that the Borneo or pygmy elephant (Elephas maximus borneensis) was a different species from those found on the Asian mainland.

The Borneo subspecies are found in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan, which shares the same island as Borneo.

According to one story, the Raja of Java gifted two Bornean elephants to Raja Baguinda around 1395.

Rajah Baguinda Ali, also known as Rajah Baginda Ali, Rajah Baginda, Raha Baguinda, or Rajah Baguinda, was a prince from a Minangkabau kingdom in Sumatra, Indonesia called Pagaruyung. He was the leader of the forming polity in Sulu, Philippines, which later became the Sultanate of Sulu. 

During that period, elephants were appropriate gifts from one ruler to another or a person of high standing, and it was customary to transport them by sea.

The Sultanate of Sulu enjoyed peaceful ties with the Hindu Sultanate of Java, and as a token of appreciation, the rulers of Java sent their elephants to the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao, and skeletal remains of small elephants were later found in the latter area in the main island of Mindanao.

The story goes that because of the lack of land ideal for their habitats, the elephants were shipped by the Sultan of Sulu to northeast Borneo to help in hauling logs used in the construction of their sailing ships. Most of the elephants under the employ of Sulu’s shipbuilders and traders were later released into the forests of Borneo and became the ancestors of a feral population at the western end of Borneo in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan.

Another version relates that the elephants were presented to the Sultan of Sulu in 1750 by the East India Company and later set free in Northern Borneo. A still later account tells of a wild elephant population that existed in Jolo during the pre-Spanish era, who were the offspring of the two elephants given to Raja Baguinda, but which eventually died out in 1850.

What is certain is that the arrival of elephants in the north Kalimantan region of Borneo coincides with the rule of the Sultans of Sulu over Sabah. Here indeed was a historical link between the elephants of Borneo and the Sultanate of Sulu in Southern Philippines. – Rappler.com