Ether 9:19“And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.”
AAF Newsletter# 1UAS #4 20 January 1952
4.6 John L. Sorenson:
The claim of the Book of Ether that the earliest Jaredites found "elephants" in this land has not in the past been supported by good evidence. Elephants (mastodons or mammoths) have long been known in North America (including Mexico), but until recently the remains have been dated no later than about 8000 B.C. Now the carbon-14 method of dating provides data on the early Cochise food-gathering culture of southern Arizona, showing that the state of their development contemporaneous with elephants extends down to at least 4000 B.C. and possibly later. In the Moist lands of Central America elephants and other large Pleistocene animals certainly lived later than in the drying Southwest. In fact recent discoveries show that the camel, sloth, extinct buffalo and perhaps others lived much later in Mexico and Central America than had been supposed. Since the larger part of this probably Book of Mormon area is virtually unknown to paleontologists we may feel confident that future work (by Later-day Saint scientists?) will definitely confirm the presence of the animals credited to that area in the time of the Jaredites and Nephites.
Indians in Yucatan described a large beast in the jungles to the Spaniards that could only be an elephant. A supposed elephant carved on a Maya monument at Copan with a man sitting on its head has been dismissed by archaeologists as probably a stylized taper. But it looks more like an elephant, especially with the human size reference. I personally identified and recorded two separate Indian petroglyphs in a rock canyon east of Escalante, Utah, that are dead ringers for a mammoth and mastadon. We don't know their date, but they could be post ice age. Their association with other petroglyphs could date them to the Archaic period during Jaredite times. These limited evidences sustain but don't prove the Book of Mormon case. They do dismiss the old argument that lack of evidence is negative evidence against the Book of Mormon. An excerpt of the News article follohttps://www.ancientamerica.org/library/index.php3?id=/9.%20AAF%20Notes