Japanese records of P. naumanni date to around 24,000 years ago. Similar dates have been reported for Indian P. namadicus and Chinese Palaeoloxodon. Some of the Mediterranean dwarf species held on for longer, with the youngest dates for the Cyprus dwarf elephant around 12,000 years ago. P. tiliensis from the Greek island of Tilos was suggested to have survived as recently as 3,500 years Before Present based on preliminary radiocarbon dating done in the 1970s, which would make it the youngest surviving elephant in Europe, but this has not been thoroughly investigated. In a 2012 paper, Li Ji and colleagues from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Beijing, argued that 3000 year old teeth from Northern China previously believed to belong to Asian elephants were actually those of Palaeoloxodon. They also argued that Chinese ritual bronze vessels depicting trunks with two "fingers" must be Palaeoloxodon (which are only known from bones; their trunk characteristics are unknown) because Asian elephants only have one. Fossil elephant experts Victoria Herridge and Adrian Lister disagree with the assignment, stating that the claimed diagnostic dental features are actually contrast artifacts created due to the low image resolution of the figures in the scientific paper, which are not evident in better-quality photographs, and that the Bronze age vessels could be the result of stylistic choice. References Prehistoric elephants Pliocene proboscideans Pleistocene proboscideans Prehistoric placental genera