ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Radiocarbon dating of seized ivory confirms rapid decline in African elephant populations and provides insight into illegal trade.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Variation in Human Bone Collagen Turnover Among Skeletal Elements.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Species identification of ivory and bone museum objects using minimally invasive proteomics.Science advances · 2024Article
- 14-Carbon demonstrates that some illegal ivory is being taken from government stockpiles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- Elephant genotypes reveal the size and connectivity of transnational ivory traffickers.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Article
- Changes to Carbon Isotopes in Atmospheric COGlobal biogeochemical cycles · 2020Article
- Combating transnational organized crime by linking multiple large ivory seizures to the same dealer.Science advances · 2018Article
- Applying the principles of isotope analysis in plant and animal ecology to forensic science in the Americas.Oecologia · 2018Review
- Freshwater reservoir offsets and food crusts: Isotope, AMS, and lipid analyses of experimental cooking residues.PloS one · 2018Article
- Optical Measurement of Radiocarbon below Unity Fraction Modern by Linear Absorption Spectroscopy.The journal of physical chemistry letters · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Carbon-14 measurements on 231 elephant ivory specimens from 14 large ivory seizures (≥0.5 ton) made between 2002 and 2014 show that most ivory (ca 90%) was derived from animals that had died less than 3 y before ivory was confiscated. This indicates that the assumption of recent elephant death for mortality estimates of African elephants is correct: Very little "old" ivory is included in large ivory shipments from Africa. We found only one specimen of the 231 analyzed to have a lag time longer than 6 y. Patterns of trade differ by regions: East African ivory, based on genetic assignments of geographic origin, has a much higher fraction of "rapid" transit than ivory originating in the Tridom region of Cameroon-Gabon-Congo. Carbon-14 is an important tool in understanding patterns of movement of illegal wildlife products.
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