General George S. Patton on the intelligence of two-trunked elephants.
p. 146
I wonder if Niven and Pournelle read this?
Exapno, I remember “The Tetrahedrons of Space”. It was mainly remarkable for its use of flipped punctuation: So many sentences ended with exclamation points, that the rare few that ended with periods stood out as emphasized.
Naah, it’s made explicit that the Predecessors were native to the Fithp homeworld, and died out there - they aren’t indicated as having Uplifted the Fithp themselves, that happened after they died out by normal evolution.
Nobody knows what world the Predecessors were native to, since nobody even knows what they looked like. And they died out (or left, or whatever) before the Fithp reached sapience, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t start the process before then.
It’s explicitly stated that they did die out, as a result of their own environmental excesses. There’s nothing in the novel indicating that the Fithp, at any rate, thought of them as anything other than native.
Also, this doesn’t sound like any Earth-elephant:
Looks like they already had branched trunks, and were even smaller than the evolved Fithp. That doesn’t spell Earth-elephant.