Discoveries

April 21, 2023

Taming Oneself

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A new study found that wild African elephants are one of the few known species that may have domesticated themselves – meaning they didn’t need humans to tame them, according to New Scientist.

Domestication is generally known as the process of adapting wild animals and plants for human use. In animals, this usually involves breeding them into friendlier, more sociable, and docile creatures.

Some scientists suggest that humans and bonobos – a closely related primate – have also undergone the process, and have done it naturally, by themselves.

Now, a team of researchers believes that wild African savannah elephants show signs of self-domestication.

They noticed that humans, bonobos, and elephants display similar behaviors and share some attributes. These included long childhoods, playfulness, and caring for the offspring of others in their group.

Wild African elephants have a shorter jawline – a trait shared with many other domesticated animals – and exhibit restraint in aggression toward others.

On a genetic level, the team also found some commonalities between the genomes of domesticated animals and those of wild elephants: They identified 79 African elephant genes associated with domestication in other animals.

The findings are significant because humans and elephants are not closely related, which means that domestication can evolve convergently in different branches of the mammalian evolutionary tree.

While some scientists remain skeptical of the findings and the idea of self-domestication, the authors are hoping to study the phenomenon further, including other species such as dolphins, seals, and Asian elephants.

This story originally appeared in the April 21, 2023 newsletter, Paradise, Imperfect.