Elephants may be domesticating themselves

https://www.science.org/content/article/elephants-may-be-domesticating-themselves

by thala • 3 years ago

122 141 3 years ago

ftxbro6• 3 years ago

"The scientists compared wild African elephants from the species Loxodonta africana with bonobos and humans on 19 social, cognitive and physical traits. The researchers found that elephants, like bonobos and humans, are not very aggressive, play a lot, have a long childhood. [...] By comparing the genome of wild African savannah elephants with those of 261 domesticated mammals such as dogs, cats and horses, the scientists identified 79 genes linked to domestication in other species that seem to have become more common in elephant generations over time."

what if we've been 'domesticating' them by killing the tuskiest ones for ivory or because we don't like their musth rampages, neotenizing even the wild populations

rirze• 3 years ago

These behaviors have been present in oral histories of elephants for the last two thousand years or so. As far as I know, the intense hunting for tusks responsible for the endangerment of elephant species has only been present in the last few centuries. My bet is that this self-domestication has been occurring for a long time. At most, the recent selection for killing those with aggressive behavior, large tusks, would be an additional factor in this process.

chewbacha2• 3 years ago

Rapid population bottlenecks can easily cause non-linear evolutionary change by drastically changing the histogram of phenotypes.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

"At most, the recent selection for killing those with aggressive behavior, large tusks"

Are million+ years recent?

Humans successfully hunt big animals since we exist and all the hunter societies that still exist, share the idea that the biggest trophies come from killing the most fearsome animals. And if an animal killed a tribe member, killing that specific animal comes with great respect for the hunter. So the organized hunting of elephants especially for their tusks might be a recent thing, but killing dangerous individuals is not.

thatguy0900• 3 years ago

Makes me curious what animals were like before we started killing everything that looked at us funny and eating anything that didn't immediately run away

AdmiralAsshat• 3 years ago

Most of our modern farm animals and even wildlife have been domesticated in some way to the point that they're not really equipped to deal with predators, so you can look to their ancestors to see how they used to function.

See: the aurochs (ancestor of the modern cow) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

The boar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar

The jackrabbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare

The junglefowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl

etc.

HarryHirsch2• 3 years ago

Looks at the Americas - humans appeared there only 15 kyrs ago while in Africa the wildlife evolved to survive in the presence of our species.

dncornholio• 3 years ago

Not sure what I'm reading. Wild elephants are super unpredictable and are more times aggressive than they are not, especially when they have youngs..

ftxbro6• 3 years ago

Maybe you can imagine it like an analogy. Imagine you saw a very big thing. Now later you see that the thing is still big, but it's a little bit less big. Someone might even say that it has become smaller. But this is a paradox because even though it is big how can you say that it is smaller, when the word 'smaller' itself contains the word 'small' which is the opposite of 'big'?

mmmBacon• 3 years ago

I’m sure it’s true that wild elephants can be aggressive.

I was surrounded by a herd of elephants in Pilansberg National Park in South Africa. We remained calm and they just walked around our vehicle.

Was simultaneously terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

p_j_w• 3 years ago

Less aggressive doesn't mean not aggressive. It's a comparison. They're far less aggressive than most any other animal that could give you a bad day is. I'd rather run into a wild elephant than a wild wolf, lion, hippo, giraffe, etc.

justinator3• 3 years ago

Self-domesticating seems an interesting evolutionary track for the survival of a species. Elephants may have a bit of a hard time totally committing to it, as they're somewhat large. I have a hard time visualizing a herd wandering around a large city - although I do enjoy the clever elephants that cross streets and seemingly "thank" stopped motorists, or elephants that steal food from trucks they've stopped (obvy I can't tell intent)

alpha_squared• 3 years ago

If they're domesticating themselves in some way, natural evolution can take care of the rest (e.g. smaller sizes leading to long-enough lifespans to successfully mate and raise offspring long enough to repeat the cycle).

xwdv• 3 years ago

It would be a shame if mighty elephants were evolved to the size of piglets that people keep as pets.

Jeff_Brown• 3 years ago

The definition of "domestication" in this article does not seem to have anything to do with living with humans. It says bonobos have self-domesticated.

I'm honestly not sure the term is even well-defined.

justinator3• 3 years ago

In a round about way, I think it does mean being able to live around humans, by being less violent, and well: dumber. Humans were also domesticated, killed each other less (if you can believe that), became even dumber (if you can believe that), and well: look at our population.

Here's basically the same article about bonobos,

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tame-theory-did-b...

Being less aggressive, if I'm not reading things backwards, allows for a longer maturation time, and perhaps higher intelligence. Some domesticated animals show high intelligence, like bonobos and dogs. I wonder if the same idea applies to dolphins.

ip26• 3 years ago

In this context it’s basically pro-social, cooperative strategy. An environment where social ability is a meaningful factor in success, not just physical prowess.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

Humans kill anything that poses a threat to humans. Plenty of wild animals have had their populations decimated by this (bears, wolves, tigers, lions, etc).

And the much smaller populations that remain tend to be the less aggressive/less dangerous ones.

stainablesteel2• 3 years ago

this is right but i think your perspective is off just a little

the bears, wolves, tigers and lions you listed are things that are still alive, humans probably got along with them more over the past 10-20,000 years than they did all the things they hunted to extinction. i think its rare to find a large animal, bigger than a small dog, that doesn't look cute in some way [to humans] when its not angry. this was their defense mechanism.

markhahn• 3 years ago

prosocial evolution is a lot better term than "self-domestication". of course, it's also completely unexceptional, so perhaps not favored in the academic (publishing) ecosystem.

stainablesteel2• 3 years ago

i wonder if this is a case of humans having domesticated them in the past (probably for war), then that population ended up going free for whatever reason, and they still have the traits because they're elephants and nothing will eat them

FredPret7• 3 years ago

If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia.

An elephant goes where he wants and does what he wants, and only extremely thick steel or a fearless / stupid human with an elephant gun can stop it.

Now imagine 100k elephants working together and humanity is armed only with muskets.

I imagine primitve cannon would be effective, but in this alternate history, disciplined young elephants might charge and overcome an artillery position.

TeMPOraL2• 3 years ago

Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone. I for one don't think I'd be disciplined enough to hold my ground against charging ~~Ultralisks~~ elephants with just a musket in hand.

FredPret7• 3 years ago

It would only work if the elephants were completely disciplined and ignored injury, death of friends, and noise. But they could take down all but thick walls, and they can absorb a lot of bullets / almost unlimited arrows. They wouldn't have battlefield medicine (no hands) and their population does not grow very fast.

Pre-gunpowder humanity would be toast.

HarryHirsch2• 3 years ago

There's a story in the Jungle Book about just that. That said, wild pigs are frightening, they are armed and brave.

arrosenberg• 3 years ago

We know that's not true. The Romans had no problem repelling them at the Battle of Zama. The legion or phalanx would just need to be trained to make noise to frighten them and open up lanes for the elephant to charge through (they weren't keen on charging into a wall of spears), and then you have a dedicated group of skirmishers to hunt the elephants down once they pass the line.

allturtles• 3 years ago

Maybe, if we are positing alternate-history elephants that will hold formation like trained warriors.

We have pretty strong empirical evidence that real life elephants do not seriously outclass formations of humans armed with iron weapons. They were used in warfare in the Mediterranean for a few hundred years and in Asia for many centuries after that. They had some shock value, but never became a dominant, war-winning component of any army.

nordsieck2• 3 years ago

Imagining a bunch of elephants charging a fortified position in formation, I think they'd win most battles through shock/fear factor alone.

Even trained war elephants weren't great, or at least that was the conclusion of the Romans once they had enough experience with them.

They might be enough to route civilians, but probably not anyone in the military. Soldiers used to be expected to walk into enemy canon and musket fire with discipline and good order.

Also, there were black powder elephant guns. Apparently 4-bore rifles were popular for both big game and birds.

fl7305• 3 years ago

The Romans are said to have used war pigs against elephants.

They set the pigs on fire and sent them towards the elephants, who panicked and trampled the people around them.

cocothem• 3 years ago

make that few hundred thousand years ago. We were probably much more fragile then, but still doubtful any other animal could

vlovich123• 3 years ago

I don’t think 200 years ago is enough time. Humans already had centrally fortified positions (castles), cannons, guns etc. heck the Gatling gun was already 162 years ago. You need to go further back but that would likely just extend the inevitable as humans extend their technological advantage where the elephants aren’t (eg colder climates which is where a lot of tech advancement happened). So for them to actually defend against humans they’d need to similarly be able to do tech which their morphology prevents them from engaging in really. There’s also the other problem that they’re territorial but not expansionist. They’re not like lions that capture and defend large swathes of territory either. They just protect their herd / fight elephants for territory which makes sense because they’re not predators like we are. In other words, not only do they need richer communication to organize (which arguably they probably do to some extent), they need to have a complete change in how they’ve evolved to think about the world in terms of hunting like a pack / developing military strategy. Humans are annoyingly adaptable and dangerous and will adapt military techniques (and by the 1800s we’ve had millennia of fine tuning armies)

perlgeek2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure elephants can communicate with each other and coordinate, at least to some degree. As do many social species.

For me, a really interesting question is: why did humans evolve to build huge civilizations and spent so much energy on technology, when others species haven't?

I've heard several podcasts, some claim it's because humans think (much more) about the future. Others say it's because we use counterfactual reasoning. Others again say it's because we think about the future. Yet others say it's our curiosity, that seem to be much more pronounced than in other species.

None of these really convinced me. I kinda think that if we didn't encroach on other species' ecosystems and waited just a few million (or a few tens of million) years, some other species might develop and dominate similar to how humans do now.

Of course, that's not really practical, so now I wonder if there could be a way to simulate that.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

why did humans evolve to build huge civilizations and spent so much energy on technology, when others species haven't?

In a nutshell -- because humans invented agriculture, which led to ballooning human populations, and then the agriculture at scale required to sustain those populations required centralized laws and control (e.g. enforcing legal contracts around shared irrigation) which is a civilization. And agriculture is so valuable that civilizations use the economic surplus to invent weapons to invade other civilizations, so we jump from food tech to warfare tech.

But agriculture seems to be the main factor. Of course you can go further back and ask why humans invented agriculture where other animals haven't, and it's probably some combination of opposable thumbs and the social intelligence we developed to live in tribes etc. Elephants might have tremendous social intelligence but they don't seem to have the physical dexterity to hoe a field. (There might also be something about physical size, where elephants are too big, so they eat too much relative to what agriculture could produce through their physical output.)

toast0• 3 years ago

Toxoplasmosis forces us to work for cats. Developing society allows us to better care for cats. QED.

moi2388• 3 years ago

Farming. Before that we accomplished jack shit.

OJFord• 3 years ago

The set of species that could conceivably do anything remotely similar/recognisable as such is basically primates. Within which there's no non-debunked evidence of intelligence/learning on anything like the same level - and they even benefit from the existence of us studying & trying to train them.

Another answer of course is 'they have, but they're extinct/superseded now' (others of the homo genus).

aaronblohowiak• 3 years ago

You may enjoy “the children of time” novel. It was a recommendation here on HN and I quite enjoyed it

kibwen• 3 years ago

Humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction 10,000 years ago, and those were the size of African elephants.

FredPret7• 3 years ago

There was probably never a woolly rebellion where they banded together against us though

concordDance• 3 years ago

Humans with spears can take on elephants. You'd probably have to go back to the invention of fire for elephants to drive humans out. Intelligence is a huge advantage, humans can make walls, have pike formations, farm fields, burn down forests, etc.

FredPret7• 3 years ago

A bull elephant is the true king of the jungle. But a lot of humans with zero self-regard could take down maybe one or two elephants at a time.

Perhaps an ancient Roman legion with a ballista - and balls of steel - could do some damage.

But you can only stop a herd of elephants that work together with modern technology.

The only early walls that can stop elephants would would be castle walls and thicker, and those are major projects that you'd have to undertake while getting tusked and stomped. Maybe ditches would work better, or caltrops.

bioemerl• 3 years ago

They kind of did. Mammoths and such existed for a very long time and it seemed like life on earth was big, not as big as in the time of the dinosaurs, but a lot of creatures were getting quite large akin to them.

Humans then left Africa and killed them all off. Our environmental niche seems to be perfect for hunting and killing big grazers.

It's our world now!

ianbicking2• 3 years ago

It feels to me like it's a coincidence of evolutionary pressures and timelines that humans evolved to a take-off level of intelligence before elephants or whales. Whales especially just haven't had the time, they are a much younger species/order than primates. If humpback whales had been contemporaneous with, say, australopithecus, who knows how things would have gone. And elephants maybe just didn't win the roll of the dice, it feels like there were some very pivotal moments of evolution where our ancestors were under tremendous pressure, where small populations and a tenuous grasp on species survival led to unique intellectual adaptations.

It would be fun to imagine a world where the Americas were just out of reach of human migration, but an elephant species on the continents developed speech and abstraction. In my mind it would be a smaller species of elephant, of which there were many, and who may have more need to take advantage of intelligence to prosper.

I also think about r- and K-selected species [1]; whether the survival of a species depends on the fitness of the individual or the fitness of the parent. Humans are incredible parents (being K-selected), and we preserve our line by preserving our children. We're physically decent I suppose, but definitely not as children. Whales are similar, with small numbers of children who require almost heroic parental effort to raise. Elephants are definitely on the same spectrum.

[1] https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/r_and_k_selection/r_and_k...

FredPret7• 3 years ago

Humans are incredibly badass physically once they reach adulthood. We have endurance, immune systems, and digestive systems that seem tailor-made for world domination. (you could walk a horse to death, and that's an animal we bred for endurance)

The catch is you have to be smart to take advantage of these things.

User235• 3 years ago

Human children, boys especially, often appear to be actively trying to get themselves maimed or killed.

bilsbie3• 3 years ago

You just can’t succeed technologically underwater. Can’t make fire. Can’t mix things, etc.

idiotsecant• 3 years ago

I think that 'take off' level of intelligence requires that increased intelligence lead to increased biological benefit. Those complex brains are expensive.

Since elephants aren't carnivores I don't think they would get much benefit out of the reasoning skills that enabled us to be really excellent pack hunters, which was probably why more intelligent ancestors of humans managed to out-compete the less intelligent ones.

If elephants gain abstract reasoning skills what does it get them? More efficient harvesting of bananas?

f6v• 3 years ago

who knows how things would have gone

There would be living ships, of course. This is a Star Maker reference.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

I sometimes think about how if humans were to go extinct, and some other species were to eventually develop intelligence and replace us, then there is a pair of animals walking (or swimming or flying) the earth today that would be the ancestors of that species.

sjducb• 3 years ago

Whales lack hands. It's hard to build anything without hands. Without technology intelligence isn't much use.

badpun• 3 years ago

They didn't prove to be that important in pre-modern warfare, though. Much less impactful than a horse. So maybe they're actually not that hard to deal with.

TSiege• 3 years ago

Humans literally made mammoths extinct with stone tools on multiple continents

bilsbie3• 3 years ago

Mammoths could have made those same tools though. The trunks had the dexterity.

bilsbie3• 3 years ago

This would make an amazing premise for a novel or movie!

rvba• 3 years ago

Couldnt they also be stopped by simple ditches / dugouts - maybe guarded by some warriors with spears?

starbase2• 3 years ago

Delusional. It would be no contest.

Elephants are terrain-limited herbivores with limited manual dexterity and zero technology. They must spend most of their waking hours foraging.

We are omnivorous masters of terrain, endurance, fire, weapons, ropes, rock quarrying, deforestation, and deception. We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes and spend the rest of the day waging war.

DubiousPusher2• 3 years ago

We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes

That is not at all now it has gone for most of human history. Feudalism and its ancient world precursors, an entire religious-social-economic system of vassalage, was necessary concentrate the tiny bits of surplus food into long standing specialized military forces.

sampo• 3 years ago

Yet, humans lost the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

jasonwatkinspdx• 3 years ago

Humans hunted mammoths friend.

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

Humans had long settled in places that elephants couldn't survive by 200 years ago. They wouldn't fare better attacking Russia in winter than Napoleon did. I don't know how well they could tolerate winter in Germany, say.

And, echoing other comments here, their close relatives who _could_ tolerate winter outside the tropics were long extinct by this point.

Edit to add: the worst they could do would be raiding parties in the late summer and autumn, eating whole harvests. Landbound pachyderm Vikings?

zyang• 3 years ago

That made me laugh. Ever seen an elephant trying to climb out of a ditch.

addled2• 3 years ago

I've read that the Romans got pretty good at anti-elephant tactics.

https://acoup.blog/tag/elephants/

glerk• 3 years ago

Even at comparable levels of intelligence and social coordination, agility and opposable thumbs go a long way. This is a fun thought experiment, but my bet is on the humans.

ftxbro6• 3 years ago

but they have opposable noses

ftxbro6• 3 years ago

i'm not judging it but the fact this thread got so much hacker news engagement is interesting like we are cavemen and we want to talk about how we can fight elephants and mammoths

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

If all the African elephants 200 or so years ago could communicate and coordinate, they could more or less take over the world - at least Africa + Eurasia.

The trebuchet would be enough to stop them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#Comparison_of_differ...

Now imagine 100k elephants working together and humanity is armed only with muskets.

Crossbow would be sufficient. Your target is as big as an elephant. Whaling harpoons were also very popular for a very long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling#History

Nifty3929• 3 years ago

Trenches would stop them pretty well.

sandworm101• 3 years ago

> An elephant goes where he wants and does what he wants, and only extremely thick steel or a fearless / stupid human with an elephant gun can stop it.

Or a small ditch. Or fast-moving water. Or rocky terrain. Or any incline of more than 25 degrees. An elephant is about as off-road capable as a Humvee or Jeep. It can do great things in the commercials, but in reality can only handle a small percentage of realworld terrain. Humans and other predators are amazing capable across most any terrain. Even without firearms, we would have wiped them out in a single generation had we put our minds to the task.

We managed to deal with mammoths.

lIl-IIIl• 3 years ago

African hunter gatherers have been hunting elephants for ages without guns or steel, who are maybe fearless but definitely not stupid. Search for "Pygmy elephant hunt".

Also many people think that mammoths were hunted to extinction by humans.

dickholesalad• 3 years ago

We already did this. Humans hunted all the megafauna, including mammoths, to extinction.

perlgeek2• 3 years ago

My impression was that wolfs self-domesticated into dogs as well.

The story I heard about wolf domestication was that some wolfs started living nearer to humans, cooperated during hunts, ate their scrap etc. I would consider this self-domestication.

If humans had captured wolfs and selectively bred them to be less aggressive, that wouldn't be self-domestication.

Or am I totally off track here?

Zetice• 3 years ago

You're missing the "self" part. The fact that humans are heavily involved in how wolves became domesticated means they're not "self" domesticated, at least as defined in this specific article.

tantalor2• 3 years ago

Same for cats:

wildcats, such as the species Felis lybica, began exploiting new resources offered by human environments, such as a proliferation of rodents in grain stores. These cats were tolerated by people, supporting their natural evolution to deviate further from their wild counterparts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication#Cats

bluGill2• 3 years ago

If you read the article, this is using a different definition of domestication. Both are types of self-domestication, but they are also different. Cats domesticate to live with/near human society. Elephants are domesticating not to live with humans, but to live in a society of their own.

tantalor2• 3 years ago

That certainly sounds like a novel sense of the word "domesticate" that most people would not recognize.

Maybe a better word would be "socialized".

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

inb4 USA liberates Elephants with $500 trillion aid package

anaganisk• 3 years ago

Is the watering hole or the elephant graveyard above oil or lithium or uranium deposits tho?

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

The watering hole wants to be part of NATO, but the Elephants domesticating the others, don't want that to happen (there's lithium under the graveyard) ...

tl;dr - they want democracy

nologic01• 3 years ago

Domestication: the process of hereditary reorganization of wild animals and plants into domestic and cultivated forms according to the interests of people [1].

Using this word in the title is clearly not reflecting the nature of what might be happening. The correct term would probably be neoteny [2] or juvenilization

[1] Britannica and every other credible reference on the English language out there

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny

felideon• 3 years ago

Interesting concept, but the article is referring to self-domestication[1]:

Yet he and evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University have long held that self-domestication—a phenomenon where wild animals develop traits that are similar to domesticated animals [...].

"Elephants may be self-domesticating" would sound odd to the general reader. Indeed the paper referenced[2] is titled "Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208607120

ComputerGuru• 3 years ago

It's now widely accepted that cats self-domesticated, making this claim ("Find would put pachyderms in a rare group that only includes humans and bonobos") a bit dubious.

Here's one article on the matter: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/domestica...

joewferrara• 3 years ago

Pretty interesting that signs of self domestication include a shrunken brain and aggressive males being eliminated from the population. I would not have thought that our brains have shrunk since we (humans) became self domesticated.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

A further data point here is that Homo Neanderthalensis had a larger brain volume than Homo Sapiens.

Elephants may be domesticating themselves

Related Stories