Wild African elephants may have domesticated themselves

Wild elephants are one of many few recognized species to indicate indicators of self-domestication. The phenomenon has solely beforehand been documented in people and bonobos, a carefully associated primate.

People have bred animals to maximise traits such as friendliness, sociability and a docile temperament in a course of referred to as domestication. Some researchers consider people and bonobos have gone by way of the same course of however that they’ve naturally performed it to themselves.

Limor Raviv on the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics within the Netherlands questioned if different species have self-domesticated too. She determined to begin with African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), a species with which she was already acquainted. She and her colleagues checked out how the elephants in contrast with bonobos (Pan paniscus) and people on 20 totally different measures.

They discovered that each one three species show comparable behaviours and share sure bodily options. Like bonobos and people, elephants are social, play, have a protracted childhood and take care of the offspring of others of their group. Wild African elephants’ additionally share a shortened jawbone – a trait shared by many domesticated animals – and present restraint in aggression towards others.

Subsequent, the researchers appeared for commonalities between the genome of domesticated animals and the genome of wild elephants. By drawing on research of 261 mammals corresponding to cattle, canine, cats and horses, they constructed a listing of genes ceaselessly related to domestication. They then recognized 674 genes as having a excessive probability of being handed down from earlier elephant generations.

The crew discovered that 79 of these African elephant genes have been related to domestication in different species, additional strengthening the concept that elephants developed these traits with out the direct intervention of individuals. That is vital, says Raviv, as a result of elephants and people should not carefully associated, suggesting domestication can evolve convergently in a number of branches of the mammal evolutionary tree.

Raviv suspects Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) might also present indicators of self-domestication, however genome information was solely out there for African elephants on the time of the analysis. She says it’s doable that different very smart, social animals like dolphins, whales and parrots have additionally developed self-domestication

Melinda Zeder on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past in Washington DC takes concern with the time period self-domestication. Domestication is a mutual course of between two species, which suggests no species might do it alone, she says. “There are parallels to domestication which are fascinating to discover, however by branding it as domestication, they’re muddying the waters.”

Raviv says although self-domestication may look like “a reasonably wacky thought”, it’s nonetheless value investigating the phenomenon, even when one other rationalization is afoot. Raviv and her crew at the moment are on the lookout for indicators of self-domestication in seals, dolphins, whales and bats.