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I wonder if elephants would have been able to be as successful without hands and opposable thumbs and dexterity and stuff. Their trunk is pretty cool but they would have had to follow a rather different evolutionary path to reach civilization that didn't rely on dexterity and fine control for making and using tools etc.

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Maybe civilized elephants wouldn't really look like the elephants we know. Although people are fairly similar to apes, it would be hard to look at an ape and imagine them to evolve to humans as we are now, with bipedalism and hairlessness and all that. Maybe elephants would evolve to be smaller and more nimble, or even more dexterous than they are now, if they were to evolve to a civilized form.

I mean, apes look a lot like us. Even a spider monkey is uncomfortably similar in some ways. They have the same body plan, they have hands, etc. We and chimpanzees are not very different in how we look at all. An elephant, to become more dexterous, would either have to do some magic with its trunk or create a new appendage. And the great apes are pretty close to bipedal, elephants would have to restructure their body plan so deeply to be able to stand up that at that point, they'd just be the ancestor species of whatever the later descendant is.

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