SOLVED. Sentient elephants? [s]

[Richard]

The leader of my bookclub learned that I read scifi and asked me if I read the following book. Hah! No, if I'd read it, I'd remember it.

Remember that scene at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which unseen aliens manipulate human ancestors to trigger the development of the use of tools, and thus sentience?

Apparently there's a novel in which something similar was done to elephants, instead?

Really? Anyone know of it?

[Trilobyte]

It's probably not the one they are after, as I think it involves an elephant like species, rather than aliens tinkering with the elephants brains - but it meets the smart elephant criteria

Downward to the Earth

[Chris]

Blue Remembered Earth by Alistair Reynolds has sething like that.

[Rafi]

the only thing remotely like that that I can recall is Footfall, by Larry Niven, where elephant like aliens invade earth.

[Jan]

It miiiiiiiight be the Mammoth series by Stephen Baxter, although I don't think aliens were active in giving the Mammoths sentience. It's possible they were of their own accord.

Silverhair Longtusk Icebones

There's also this list that might be of help.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8...

[Justanotherbiblophile]

Yeah, _Footfall_ elephant-like aliens (split-tentacle, not a trunk) were engineered/messed with on their homeplanet (view spoiler)[and the losers of the latest war were sent to invade Earth for living space instead of fighting it out with world-ending weapons developed from their progenitor's technology (hide spoiler)]

[Ann aka Iftcan]

Alien elephant-like beings are very common in the Sector General books. Hospital Station is the first book in the series.

[Richard]

Wow, thank you all. I've given her this list and she's quite pleased. I would never have guessed sentient elephants were such a thing in scifi!

[Isabel (kittiwake)]

There is a novella called Jackie's-Boy featuring a genetically engineered elephant called Jackie travelling through a post-apocalyptic America with a boy, to find a herd of elephants that they have heard is living in Tennessee.

[Ficie]

This is probably not the book you are looking for, but I thought I'd mention it just in case. In The Amber Spyglass, the third book in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, a tribe of animals who live in an alternate world (and have trunks, like elephants), called Mulefa, evolve through the use of disc-shaped seed pods. A human anthropologists observes them and how they start becoming self-aware through the use of these seed pods.
I know it's bizarre and unclear, and probably not what you are looking for, but your query brought this book to mind.

[Dilcia]

Thank you everybody. The book I was looking for is FOOTFALL by Larry Niven.
It was highly recommended to me many years ago and couldn't remember the name or author...just the basic premisses of a planet being overrun by elephant-like creatures... :)
Thanks everybody!

[Richard]

(That was my reading group leader. So I'm moving this to the solved folder. Thank you, all.)

[Rafi]

Yay for finding it! Everything by Niven is excellent!