Earlier this week, Israeli archaeologists announced the discovery of a tusk belonging to a prehistoric elephant species at Kibbutz Revadim in the Negev desert. Michael Horovitz reports:

The 2.5-meter-long [more than eight feet] remnant of the huge straight-tusked elephant—which is now extinct—was discovered by Eitan Mor, a biologist from Jerusalem, who organized a trip to the area out of curiosity about the elephants, according to an Israel Antiquities Authority statement.

Scientists believe the elephant species, which would tower over their present-day descendants, arrived on Israel’s coastal plain about 800,000 years ago and died out approximately half a million years ago. According to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), findings from elephants are rare and the fossil is “of great scientific interest.”

The IAA explained that past archaeological work at Revadim, where stone and flint tools and other fossilized remains have been discovered, revealed that humans had settled the area and hunted the elephants that roamed the region.

The discovery of the tusk leads to questions over its presence at Revadim, according to Ofer Marder of Ben-Gurion University and Ianir Milevski of the IAA’s Prehistoric Branch. “Is the tusk the remains of a hunted elephant, or was it collected by the local prehistoric inhabitants? Did the tusk have social or spiritual significance?” the academics asked.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].