The role that humans played in the extinction of Pleistocene proboscideans is highly controversial. Ethnohistoric records of elephant hunting, in concert with theoretical rationales, are often used as proxy evidence to support the view that ancient humans regularly and efficiently targeted large-sized proboscideans to the point of extinction. This paper examines the socioeconomic and technological contexts of elephant hunting in contemporary and ethnohistoric records to show how these circumstances influenced the scale of harvest, productivity, and valuation of elephants. Quantitative and qualitative evidence derived from some of these records are used to analyze the efficiency of elephant capture using traditional hunting technologies (spears, poisoned projectiles, traps, and drives). This analytical framework provides a systematic method for evaluating the productivity of proboscidean predation. Results show that prior to the widespread use of firearms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the acquisition of elephants, irrespective of the traditional hunting technology used, was a dangerous, high-cost activity often associated with a high-risk of hunting failure. In the ethnographic record, elephant hunting is consistently associated with prestige-seeking among egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Although the analysis presented here is derived from hunting episodes that involved modern elephants, the physical characteristics and abilities that make these animals expensive and risky to hunt were likely manifested by most Pleistocene proboscideans. Using ethnographic data, a framework for recognizing how prestige hunting is manifested under different ecological and sociopolitical circumstances is provided and offers an alternative and compelling explanation for zooarchaeological patterning of costly prey in the past.

人类在更新世长鼻类动物的灭绝中所扮演的角色备受争议。狩猎大象的民族历史记录与理论原理相结合，经常被用作代理证据来支持这样一种观点，即古代人类经常有效地瞄准大型长鼻动物直至灭绝。本文研究了当代和民族历史记录中大象狩猎的社会经济和技术背景，以展示这些环境如何影响大象的收获规模、生产力和价值。从其中一些记录中得出的定量和定性证据用于分析使用传统狩猎技术（矛、有毒射弹、陷阱和驱动器）捕获大象的效率。该分析框架提供了评估长鼻类捕食生产力的系统方法。研究结果表明，在十八世纪和十九世纪火器广泛使用之前，无论使用何种传统狩猎技术，获取大象都是一项危险且成本高昂的活动，通常与狩猎失败的高风险相关。在人种学记录中，大象狩猎始终与平等的狩猎采集者追求声望联系在一起。尽管这里提出的分析来自于涉及现代大象的狩猎事件，但大多数更新世长鼻动物很可能表现出使这些动物狩猎昂贵且危险的身体特征和能力。利用人种学数据，提供了一个框架，用于识别声望狩猎在不同生态和社会政治环境下如何表现，并为过去昂贵猎物的动物考古学模式提供了另一种令人信服的解释。