a lot elephants He sees that one of his babies is stuck in the canal. There is a stir among the animals: the little one is on his back and cannot turn on his own. His mother walks from place to place looking for a way to get her little one out of this mess. The scene is watched by a hungry lioness waiting for the group to surrender. The baby elephant hurls its trunk in agony, its mother looks at it helplessly. The rest of the pack pressures him to leave the little one behind and run away from the lioness. The mother hesitates but does not allow it. After a few tries, he finds a way to release it: push his body from behind to let him sit. The baby elephant survives and the lioness is left without food.
This scene, reflected in the cameras of the ‘El Dodo’ channel, is an example of the sense of coexistence that elephants have developed over the centuries. This is not the only behavior that shows the effort of elephants to live in civil society. They were also recorded as comforting a distressed member of their community or accepting and mourning their dead..
No trace of previous violence
ANDElephants’ DNA seems to contain no hint of the violence that characterized their ancestors, and this has caught the attention of scientists. And after an in-depth study, It was concluded that elephants will domesticate themselves just like humans.living in a kinder and more structured society.
The domestication process is a phenomenon where wild animals develop traits similar to domestic animals such as dogs or cats. And there are distinctive features to recognize this domestication. For example, they stand out by developing a more docile personality. or infantile body features: for example, large heads and bulging eyes. But that’s not the only thing. Domesticated animals also tend to develop smaller brains than the wild ones seen in dogs, cats or pigs.
However, the published results Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would go even further as it was their first time showing elephants will have acquired these traits on their own, without human help or interaction.. This is a very rare condition and It only happened with two other known animals: bonobos and humans themselves.
Dogs or cats were domesticated through human interaction, but no one (other than man himself) knew how to tame man. Our faces have gotten shorter as our eyebrows and brains have shrunk in the last 80,000 years. These are changes that accelerated just after the invention of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. it is believed that this was because in this context the males cooperated, causing the most aggressive to perish by pure natural selection.. WITH Experts say that through this self-domestication, people extend their childhood, we prefer calmer people (to the detriment of the aggressive ones) and are able to communicate and share complex ideas with language.
Something similar happened with bonobos, humans’ closest relatives.. Despite being related to chimpanzees, bonobos are much less aggressive, have softer, rounder features, and can express affection not only for mating, but also for making friends or pacifying social conflicts. In this case, people had nothing to do with it either. Experts believe that natural selection and food abundance have created this increasingly peaceful society.
19 common traits with humans
However, it is very difficult to find other species that follow the same path. Only three elephant species (African savanna and forest elephants and Asian elephants) have shown the hallmarks of domestication. These types also exhibit low levels of aggression and violence, as well as “higher prosocial behavior” going out of their way to protect and comfort others.
Just like humans, elephants’ levels of cortisol, the hormone responsible for stress, rise when they encounter socially challenging situations such as mass hunting or culling. In total, the researchers documented 19 cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits that are common in humans, bonobos, and elephants but not in other species.
In addition, the researchers dug deeper into the genome of African elephants and found 674 genes that appear to have evolved faster than normal. They compared these genes with a set of 764 genes involved in the management of socialization and aggression, which are inherent characteristics of domestication. The result was that most of the 674 genes were associated with domestication.
I’m looking for reasons for this behavior
Researchers suggest several factors that may have triggered this self-domestication. First, they talk about the existence of safe environments. The absence of predators—they don’t have to fight other animals for a living—and the abundance of food—due to their herbaceous and generalist diet—makes them spend more time in social interactions. Another possibility is that the environment was so harsh that collaboration among peers was encouraged in the social cores.
“While some of these explanations are more likely than others, all could be potential drivers of this prosociality of elephants.”, describe the signers.
This study is a shock to the field of study, according to the researchers. “As the most recent common ancestor of humans and elephants is probably the closest common ancestor of all placental mammals, our findings have important implications for convergent evolution beyond primates,” they say.
In addition, they insist that the fact that self-domestication traits arise almost automatically from the reduction of reactive aggression suggests that this trait may be more common than previously thought and may also occur in other animals, among which they suggest dolphins and whales. etc. or parrots.
However, other scientists believe that more studies will be necessary before they can definitively determine that the elephants belong to this particular hut.
Reference work: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208607120
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