It is because of that background to my own thinking that I paid a lot of attention over the years to elephants and elephant evolution. I got to help excavate an African four-tusker one year even though I had to push off my other responsibilities to do so. I’ve studied the pseudo archaeological traces left behind by wild forest elephants in the Congo, and now and then, ate one, which may seem strange but I was living among the Pygmy elephant hunters at the time so it seemed like the thing to do.

Several years ago, I came across John McKay. First, his blog, then I met him in person. He had been writing about Pleistocene megafauna but focusing on mammoths. Over our many years of friendship, I watched as he steadily worked on a book putting together his findings, and finally, Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science has been completed and is out and in print now!

I liken the discovery of the Mammoth by western science to the mostly lost to history but critical coral reef debate involving Darwin. Both events shaped how we do science today and at the same time revealed mind-changing features of the natural world. I didn’t know until interviewing John on Ikonokast (check out the podcast!) that he had originally become interested in Mammoth by a somewhat indirect route because of the extinct animal’s role in, let us say, alt-theories about the Earth and its history. But regardless of how John became interested, he discovered a complex and almost inexplicable relationship between what people were thinking, the way they arrived at those thoughts, and reality which led to a centuries-long struggle to understand something that to us, today, is fairly simple but to 19th century scholars was outrageous.

Religion and cultural belief prohibited thinking about extinctions or the evolution of one species into another, while at the same time, these bodies of thought and knowledge provided explanations for ancient mammal remains that were, to our minds today, seemingly unbelievable. It was the process of going from being totally wrong and basing conclusions on a combination of bad information and unsupportable logic, to the state of understanding that mammoths are a different species of elephant that once existed where we find their remains, but that went extinct because of major changes in their habitats and possibly other causes.

And that is only part of the central story John brings to the reader in the engagingly written and carefully researched Discovering the Mammoth.

I tend to divide science books into two categories: those written by writers about science, and those written by scientists. Both categories have their duds and their great books, though the former category almost always lacks a certain depth and breath but often in a way the typical interested reader can’t see. Meanwhile, books in the latter category can easily go off the rails or assume too much, and be a burden to read. John McKay’s book is written by an expert on the field (this book is in lieu of his PhD thesis) who had previously spent years developing his craft of explaining scientific things, so it is well done in that regard. But there is another reason the typical reader of this blog will grok McKay’s Mammoths. John’s passion other than dead woolly elephants is falsehoods. This is an interest we share. John McKay is a Snope of science, especially in certain areas, but better. Unlike Snopes, which is content to find enough chinks in the armor of some myth or another to snarkily discard it, McKay often recognizes the ways in which a falsehood informs, and contains non-trivial truth, while various truths can misinform while at the same time containing insidious or at least interesting falsehoods. It is his thinking about the way people get things wrong, combined with scholarly training in various areas of literature and history, that uniquely allow him to tell this particular important story about the the evolution of modern scientific thought.

I highly recommend Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science. Also, consider it as a holiday gift for your favorite smart person, so they can get even smarter.

This issue is actually much more interesting than just whether or not two populations are distinct enough to be considered different species. If that’s all there was to it, there would probably still be an argument on our hands. There are lots of species with large distributions and significant morphological variation across space to allow for this sort of argument. For example, the Cape Buffalo (Syncerus caffer) and the African Forest Buffalo (also Syncerus caffer) look very different and even act somewhat differently, but they are almost certainly overlapping populations. Or at least, if you go from the cape to the forest and every now and then stop to look at the buffalo, you will see a gradation from large, black, large-horned beasts to smaller, browner, small-horned beasts, and they tend to migrate across habitats now and then.

But not so much with the forest vs bush elephant. I’ve seen many photographs of, many bones of, and many footprints of the elephants in the Semliki Valley, which is at the forest-savanna junction, and I’ve had a good look at living elephants in the Kasingi channel and vicinity, and those elephants are just like the ones I’ve seen at Nairobi, Amboseli, the Serengetti, Tarangire, Kruger, and photographs and bones I’ve examined from dozens of other places. They don’t even vary that much in size by region (but do within region), with some of the elephants on the border of the forest and bush being among the largest recorded. But just a couple of hundred kilometers into the rain forest is an entirely different kind of elephant, much smaller, and distinct in behaviors. The classic photos of these elephants are from regions far to the west, and my view of the Ituri elephants was always as a fast moving shadow. They are hunted there, so one is only allowed a close view of a living elephant under two special circumstances: You are about to kill it, or it is about to kill you. But, I’ve seen those freshly hunted by others, I’m very familiar with their prints, and thus have a sense of their size, and have handled their bones and, well, now and then eaten one. I have never held the opinion, once I started looking into this, that the bush and forest elephant were the same species. Having said that, the paper by Rohland Et Al shows a surprising time depth for their separation, but with a twist.

To understand the findings being reported, it is useful to first understand that when we consider the living elephants, we are seeing a depauperate taxon. If we go back just ten or twenty thousand years or so there were at least three major types of elephants alive beyond what we have now: Mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres. These were not three species, but rather, three taxonomic groups within which there were multiple species (depending on when and where you look). Indeed, Asian elephants, of the genus Elephas, are part of the group that dominated in Africa in the not too distant past. If you look at the African fossil record over the last several million years, you see mainly relatives of Elephas and the African form is rare or absent. More recently, what we think of as African elephants spread, and the “Asian” elephants retracted in their range.

The famous Mammoth, the big hairy one with the curvy tusks, the icon of the ice age (both the geological time period and the movie) is one of the Asian elephants, and yes, these Asian elephants were spread across Europe and North America as well. Think of it more as a northern Northern hemisphere group, surrounding the arctic circle, than African vs. Asian.

The Mammoths and the Gomphotheres, meanwhile, are separate groups that split off the elephant lineage somewhat earlier. A recent study of proboscidean (elephant) classification recognized 175 species or subspecies in 42 genera across 10 families, starting out as an aquatic life form and changing to mostly terrestrial, and at about 25 million years ago, diversifying into the pattern we see in today’s forms combined with the Pleistocene fossil forms (gomphotheres, mammoths, mastodons, African and Asian elephants, etc.)

From Shoshani and Tassy 2004: A cladogram of proboscidean taxa based on hyoid characters (from earlier work by Shoshani and Marchant).

Looking at the above diagram, you need to imagine the Loxodonta africana branch (third from the right) with two sub branches, one for the bush and one for the forest African form.

Rohland et al. analyzed both ancient and modern DNA to try to resolve the African elephant relationships. Another objective was to assess the relationship between the African and Asian elephants and the Mammoth, as prior studies had linked the Mammoth to either the Asian or African elephants (with odds favoring the Asian connection, as indicated in the particular example above). Obtaining fossil DNA was especially helpful, obviously.

The researches used a combination of modern DNA sequences and targeted PCR amplification of ancient DNA to develop a large data set of the American mastodon, the woolly mammoth, and all three groups of living elephants (Asian, African bush, and African forest).

The data strongly support that the Asian elephant is the sister species to the extinct woolly mammoth, and that the divergence of African bush and forest elephant happened as far back in the past as the divergence of Asian elephants and mammoths. That gives strong support to the species distinction among the African groups.

Demographic model for the history of the Elephantidae. See the original paper for a detailed explanation.

How far back? That’s tricky. The authors are very cautious in their estimates because key parts of the data have rather large error bars. They are very conservative in stating that the split between forest and bush elephants in Africa occurred some time between 1.9 and 7.1 million years ago.

But it was complicated. The theory is that Asian types of elephants dominated in Africa, and what was to later become the African elephants were divided into two populations, one ancestral to the forest group and one ancestral to the savanna, or bush, group. On the demise/removal/exit/whatever of the Asian elephants, the two groups maintained their genetic difference because of their habitat differences, but there was some overlap. Because of the occasional interaction between the two groups, estimates made using only mitochondrial DNA suggest a much more recent divergence.

The researchers provide a somewhat convoluted explanation that I don’t happen to like much for the difference between nuclear DNA and mtDNA, so I’ll give you what they say and then say what I think:

The finding of deep nuclear divergence is important in light of findings from mtDNA, which indicate that the F-haplogroup is shared between some forest and savanna elephants, implying a common maternal ancestor within the last half million years…. The incongruent patterns between the nuclear genome and mtDNA (”cytonuclear dissociation”) have been hypothesized to be related to the matrilocal behavior of elephantids, whereby males disperse from core social groups (”herds”) but females do not… If forest elephant female herds experienced repeated waves of migration from dominant savanna bulls, displacing more and more of the nuclear gene pool in each wave, this could explain why today there are some savanna herds that have mtDNA that is characteristic of forest elephants but little or no trace of forest DNA in the nuclear genome.

While it is true that elephants are “female bonded” it is also true that some of the more spectacular examples of long distance migration of elephants, anecdotal but nonetheless real, are of females. On a day to day basis, males may disperse, but they do so in search of con-specifics, which may have obviated a lot of inter-species interaction via male ranging. Furthermore, males coming from long distances are typically excluded by resident males, which attenuates their long distance genetic contribution. Females coming from afar are rarely excluded by local males, and less often by local females. Here, I’m speaking broadly of female bonded mammals, not specifically of elephants.

Given that within elephant groups a subset of females reproduce, based on female dominance hierarchies, it is not that unlikely for a long-distance dispersing female to end up making a larger than average contribution to the mtDNA (passed on via females) lineages of a distant region. This explanation requires a more unlikely event but a less twisted explanation. Occam’s razor, which can cut both ways in a case like this, is probably not too important. We are trying to explain a quirky result. Historical contingencies rule.

The problems with the history of elephants in Africa is actually the tip of a rather large iceberg. Despite the strong theoretical argument that Africa must have had refugia of forest patches during the dozen or so periods of the Pleistocene when the forest contracted, especially the last few when the forest must have nearly disappeared, no one has found evidence of any paleorefuge. This means that there are huge gaps in our knowledge of ancient African habitats. I’ve argued before that mid to late Holocene human activities may have erased a huge habitat in Africa, which I called Habitat X, intermediate between forest and grass-dominated parkland. Along with this poorly defined middle ground could have been huge areas of fruit-rich but also grassy habitats with limited fire (an important part of Africa’s savanna ecology today) which could have been more like some Asian habitats today. Missing habitats? Missing Asian elephants? Coincidence? Probably, but it is fun to speculate.

The paper released today is an important and well executed extension of a string of research on the topic of Elephant phylogenetic history. It seems to end the debate over the species status of the African forest elephant, and to raise interesting questions about the dynamics of elephant biogeography over the last few million years.

¹There is a caveat. I have not yet examined the “supplementary information” related to this research, which includes the details on where the samples were collected. If the forest elephant samples are all from Cameroon, Gabon and vicinity and do not include Ituri elephants, than I reserve judgment that the pattern shown in the figure and discussed in the paper is complete. The Ituri elephants may show a closer relationship to the savanna elephants, or may end up being a third population.

Photograph of the African elephants by the author. All other photographs (C) creative commons, from Wikipedia (click the pic to see the original).

SHOSHANI, J., & TASSY, P. (2005). Advances in proboscidean taxonomy & classification, anatomy & physiology, and ecology & behavior Quaternary International, 126-128, 5-20 DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2004.04.011

Rohland, N., Reich, D., Mallick, S., Meyer, M., Green, R., Georgiadis, N., Roca, A., & Hofreiter, M. (2010). Genomic DNA Sequences from Mastodon and Woolly Mammoth Reveal Deep Speciation of Forest and Savanna Elephants PLoS Biology, 8 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000564

Coverage of this story elsewhere (Have you blogged it? Please add your link to the comments!):

• Nature News: African elephants are two distinct species
• Harvard Gazette: Seeing double: New study shows Africa has two elephant species … and why that matters

So, I was living with a particular “camp” (our term for an Efe residence group) and we had just moved to a new “camp” (our term for the place the residence group lives … I know, English is a relatively primitive language, we often refer to multiple things by the same one syllable sound) and I noticed something strange. The camp itself consisted of eight or so round dome-shaped huts made of saplings and covered with giant Marantaceae leaves. The huts are more or less arranged around the outer edge of a clearing. Middens form quickly at the edge, consisting initially of the vegetation cleared from the clearing, then being augmented by kitchen waste. The cleared area is mostly exposed dirt which becomes muddy and quite slippery when it rains.

So, I was hanging out on one edge of the clearing trying to stay out of the way when I noticed one of the Efe men, the headman of the camp and my main informant, spending inordinate amounts of time chopping away at small lengths of wood and some vines, and working these materials as though making a basket or something, while everyone else was collecting Marantaceae leaves or pole-saplings for the huts or doing other camp set-up activities. Since he was working only in one small area, I figured I could meander over there later and see what he had done and eventually ask him about it, at a more appropriate time.

So, later that day I started wandering aimlessly about the camp taking things in, and in so doing, I made my way to the place where my friend had been working. There, I saw something that actually startled me and caused a minor flashback: There was a set of round holes in the ground each covered with a cage-like grate made of the saplings tied with vines that he had been working with. The reason this sight caused a flashback is unrelated to this story. Anyway, several ideas went through my mind as to what this was for. They were like little subterranean cages, but at present empty. The first thing I thought of was that some animal … maybe a baby animal … would be put in here if captured. Some Efe keep baby animals, often ducks, as pets for a short amount of time for amusement, and eventually, as a snack. I’d seen cages built for these critters before, but not underground like this. Then, it occurred to me that this could be a trap of some kind. Perhaps while setting up camp someone had detected the presence of a fossorial (underground living) creature like a colony of moles or something, and this was a way of trapping one. As an archaeologist, I knew that this could work …. moles traveling along in their preferred substrate poke through the wall of a hole, fall to the bottom, into harder subsoil, and are trapped for good. Maybe this was such a trap. But the spaces in the caging were too large to be an effective rodent trap.

Eventually, of course, things settled down in the new camp, food was being cooked, a few people had gone off to forage, and it was time to sit down and chat for a while. That was my opportunity to ask about the holes with the grates.

“So, what are those,” pointing with my chin towards the traps.

“What?”

“Those holes with the sticks tied together like this,” making a grate by holding my spread fingers of both hands at right angles to each other, not knowing the word for ‘grate.’

“Over there? Those things? The feet places”?

“Feet places?” We were using a language that was my second language and that I had only been speaking for a few months, and that was his fifth language. Feet places … hmm, what could that mean?

“Foot spots,” he said. “Not so old elephant places of the many feet,” was the next thing he said. And then it dawned on me.

“They were foot prints,”

“Yes, of elephants, but not just footprints. One specific spot like the Marantacae leaf spots you asked about the other day.”

“Huh?”

“When we were walking via the trail by bat cave, and so-and-so dropped the leaf, and then so and so dropped his leaf, all on the same spot, to make a pile of leaves along the trail, and you asked about that.”

Right. Previously, we had been walking along a trail and the man in front yanked a medium size Marantaceae leaf off of its stalk and laid it down on the trail at the base of a tree. This was common practice to point people following in the correct direction where a trail spit and conditions for observing footprints were poor. But this was a seemingly random spot with no splitting of trails, on a trail that no one had been on for a year, and thus, with no footprints.

After that first person dropped the leaf, most of the other men did the same thing so a small pile of leaves was formed. this was similar to a different practice, where one or two people, usually men, make a pile of leaves at the base of a tree that contains some resource, claiming the resource for later extraction. So I asked about that and was told there was no resource in this tree. There was no reason the men were dropping these leaves. It was just something they did “mbore.” (No reason.)

So, now, I was being told that these holes with the grates were mbore like the pile of leaves.

“So, you dug the holes and put the grate there mbore. What does this have to do with elephants?”

Laughing.

“No, no, Gregoiri, the elephants dug the holes.”

At this point, my friend stood up and did his imitation of an elephant walking, using his fists to represent the round stumpy feet of an elephant. He punched on fist repeatedly in one place.

“The elephants walk in a line, the biggest one first, the smallest one last.” Yes, I knew this … that particular elephant behavior was one way the Efe managed to hunt them. “Then the first one puts its foot in this one specific spot, like this” … imitation of an elephant taking a step … “then the second elephant puts its foot in the same exact spot” … imitation of an elephant taking a step … “and so on and so forth again and again” … repeated imitations of elephants taking steps.

“Aha!” I cried out. “Like when the guys all drop the same leaf on one spot, the elephants all step in the same exact spot, making a big hole!”

“Absolutely!”

“So why do the elephants do this?!?!?”

“Mbore!”

Of course. No reason.

Over time I was to observe this phenomenon again and again. By chance or because the trail takes a somewhat sharp turn, many of the elephants put one or two of their feet in one of three or four spots to create a small line of round holes ranging in depth from about 20 cm to up to almost a meter. In this case, there were three holes one about 50 cm deep, the others shallow, and on inspection I could see that the elephants were probably curving their impromptu trail around the edge of the camp to avoid walking through it. At first that struck me as strange, but later I learned that this was normal procedure.

“OK, but,” I asked my friend, “Why did you build one of these (making grate sign with my hands) over the holes.”

“For the children.”

“To play with?”

Laughter.

“So they don’t fall in and hurt themselves! It’s a child safety grate!”

And so …. this story about some fellow coon rapidians with a toddler who is able to get through a child safety lock put me in mind of the above story, and also sent me to Youtube for more examples of kids breaking through the anti-curiosity security systems that have been set up to keep them safe.

When Julia was little, rather than figuring out how to get through the locks, she figured out that these devices were there to limit her behavior, and more or less went along with it. She quickly learned that it was easier to get permission to explore some unsafe territory with supervision than to break through the lock. Some kids, in contrast, defines what is fun by what is disallowed. I am reticent to attribute this to innate gender differences. For now.

I think the videos above represent a range of problems, including the design of the safety device, lack of proper use, and the simple fact that humans are extra smart monkeys and you can’t have doors and drawers that adults can open that are perfectly protected from access by the little ones.

Wolverines. I once saw a wolverine in a state that was known to not have wolverines anymore. That was a long time ago and I think they are recognized as having returned to those forests. Now, we have wolverines in Colorado for the first time since 1919. I am shocked and amazed that wolverines had been extirpated from Colorado.

All ivory is bad. Antique, modern, you name it. If you buy ivory, you are poaching an African Elephant. I assume you knew this already, but here is a recent story on a related issue.

The early embryology of the elephant has never been studied before. We have obtained a rare series of African elephant (Loxodonta africana) embryos and fetuses ranging in weight from 0.04 to 18.5 g, estimated gestational ages 58-166 days (duration of gestation is â??660 days). Nephrostomes, a feature of aquatic vertebrates, were found in the mesonephric kidneys at all stages of development whereas they have never been recorded in the mesonephric kidneys of other viviparous mammals. The trunk was well developed even in the earliest fetus. The testes were intra-abdominal, and there was no evidence of a gubernaculum, pampiniform plexus, processus vaginalis, or a scrotum, confirming that the elephant, like the dugong, is one of the few primary testicond mammals. The palaeontological evidence suggests that the elephant’s ancestors were aquatic, and recent immunological and molecular evidence shows an extremely close affinity between present-day elephants and the aquatic Sirenia (dugong and manatees). The evidence from our embryological study of the elephant also suggests that it evolved from an aquatic mammal.Gaeth et al 1999

It is now well established that elephants arose during the early Eocene (about 55 million years ago) and share a taxonomic clade with the Sirenia and the Hyracoidea. I have spent a lot of time living among wild Hyracoidea, and I was just observing Sirenia the other day in the Yucatan, and I’ve gotta say, the resemblance is, well, totally non-existent. It is also well established that these creatures all arose in Africa, in an area that is now the arid regions of North Africa.Elephants looked nothing like elephants during the Eiocene. They were smaller, did not have the big long trunk, had a long tubular cranium (as opposed to a tall, more rounded cranium).The present study looks at early elephants, of the genera Barytherium and Moeritherium, and in particular looks at Oxygen and Carbon stable isotopes in the teeth of these early fossils.To put it very simply, stable isotopes are versions of a given element that are very slightly different in the atomic nucleus. These are distinct from unstable isotopes, which over time decay radioactively, often changing from one element to another. Stable isotopes do not decay. For many purposes, one isotope is the same as the other (thus the term “iso” = same) but at the atomic and molecular level, which isotope a given atom is made up can matter, in a lot of ways. Since the discovery that isotopes matter in biological and ecological systems (in the 1970s, but with much of the really important work happening int he 1980s), isotope biologists (biologists who get chemistry and physics and have mass spectrometers at their disposal) have worked out the meaning of different isotopes in animal tissue, especially (but not limited to) enamel or other bony bits. (Tooth enamel is considered the most chemically stable tissue, with bone somewhat less stable, with respect to preserving the actual atomic composition … without mineral replacement … of the original animal.)In essense, the carbon and oxygen isotope profiles of Barytherium and Moeritherium resemble those of acquatic and semi aquatic mammals.

Here we test the hypothesis of an aquatic ancestry for advanced proboscideans by measuring delta-18O in tooth enamel … The combination of low delta-18O values and low delta-18O standard deviations in Barytherium and Moeritherium matches the isotopic pattern seen in aquatic and semiaquatic mammals, and differs from that of terrestrial mammals. delta-13C values of these early proboscideans suggest that both genera are likely to have consumed freshwater plants, although a component of … terrestrial vegetation cannot be ruled out. The simplest explanation for the combined evidence from isotopes, dental functional morphology, and depositional environments is that Barytherium and Moeritherium were at least semiaquatic and lived in freshwater swamp or riverine environments, where they grazed on freshwater vegetation. These results lend new support to the hypothesis that Oligocene-to-Recent proboscideans are derived from amphibious ancestors.

Liu, A.G., Seiffert, E.R., Simons, E.L. (2008). Stable isotope evidence for an amphibious phase in early proboscidean evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(15), 5786-5791. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0800884105Gaeth, A.P. Et Al. (1999) The developing renal, reproductive, and respiratory systems of the African elephant suggest an aquatic ancestry. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1999 May 11; 96(10): 5555-5558.

…In this study, we combined paleo-climate simulations, climate envelope models (which describe the climate associated with the known distribution of a species–its envelope–and estimate that envelope’s position under different climate change scenarios), and a population model that includes an explicit treatment of woolly mammoth-human interactions to measure the extent to which climate changes, increased human pressures, or a combination of both factors might have been responsible. Results show a dramatic decline in suitable climate conditions for the mammoth between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, with hospitable areas in the mid-Holocene being restricted mainly to Arctic Siberia, where the latest records of woolly mammoths in continental Asia have been found. The population model results also support the view that the collapse of the climatically suitable area caused a significant drop in mammoth population size, making the animals more vulnerable to increasing hunting pressure from expanding human populations. The coincidence of the collapse of climatically suitable areas and the increase in anthropogenic impacts in the Holocene are most likely to have been the coup de grace, which set the place and time for the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

The map of diminishing envelope looks like this:View larger imageWe are left still not knowing what happened to the Woolly Mammoth. It is tempting to assume that once their range was restricted, humans would have easily finished them off, but the area to which their range was restricted probably never had that many humans living in it. Simple range restriction followed by any one of a number of bits of bad luck would have done it.The technology to bring the Woolly Mammoth back is almost within reach. We should start thinking about that as an option. Just for fun.

Related posts:Did Humans or Climate Change Cause the Extinctions of Pleistocene Eurasian Megafauna?Darwin and the Voyage: 11 ~ Elephants and HorsesThe Evolution of the Modern Climate: New Evidence from Plant RemainsAre We In The Anthropocene? No.Mammals and the KT EventAfter the End Permian Mass ExtinctionRelated posts from other blogs:Not Exactly Rocket Science: Climate change knocked mammoths down, humans finished them offA Blog Around the Clock: So, why did the mammoths REALLY go extinct?Source:(Sorry for the odd formatting … this is an automatically generated reference that allows important inter-tube magic to happen so I don’t want to mess with it…)NoguÃ?©s-Bravo, D., RodrÃ?­guez, J., Hortal, J., Batra, P., AraÃ?ºjo, M.B., Barnosky, A. (2008). Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. PLoS Biology, 6(4), e79. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060079>Please note our new “share this” feature (below). If you were wondering where the “email this post” button went, you will find it there.

I have had this experience. I’ve traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.

But I’ve also traveled many kilometers (not as many) alone. I would see many animals, and yes, they would run (or climb or whatever) away, but not as desperately. They knew I was not really one of the hunters, although I tried my best to look tough and hungry.

Of course, when I use the word “animal” here I mean mammals and birds mainly. Insects, not so much.

I’ve had similar experiences elsewhere in Africa as well, where what we humans would call “ethnicity” was obviously being picked up by mammals.

Well, now there is some research to back this up:

Some species distinguish several species of predator, giving differentiated warning calls and escape reactions; here, we explore an animal’s classification of subgroups within a species. We show that elephants distinguish at least two Kenyan ethnic groups and can identify them by olfactory and color cues independently. In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men demonstrate virility by spearing elephants (Loxodonta africana), but Kamba agriculturalists pose little threat. Elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai. Elephants are therefore able to classify members of a single species into subgroups that pose different degrees of danger.

Here is a picture of elephants upset by exposure to Maasai clothing:

And here’s the data to back it up:

This research demonstrates that elephants discriminate both using olfaction and vision, with these two sources of information processed separately and accurately, to assess risk from different sorts of people. Considering the amount of energy one must spend … and time one must waste .. running away from threats, this does indeed make a lot of sense.

BATES, L. A., SAYIALEL, K. N., NJIRAINI, N. W., MOSS, C. J., POOLE, J. H. & BYRNE, R.W. (2007): Elephants Classify Human Ethnic Groups by Odor and Garment Color.. Curr Biol, , .

South Africa Allows Killing of Elephants from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — South Africa said Monday that it will start killing elephants to reduce their burgeoning numbers, ending a 13-year ban and possibly setting a precedent for other African nations.[…]

Maybe they should just do this: “How to catch a herd of elephants”

I have had this experience. I’ve traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.

But I’ve also traveled many kilometers (not as many) alone. I would see many animals, and yes, they would run (or climb or whatever) away, but not as desperately. They knew I was not really one of the hunters, although I tried my best to look tough and hungry.

Of course, when I use the word “animal” here I mean mammals and birds mainly. Insects, not so much.

I’ve had similar experiences elsewhere in Africa as well, where what we humans would call “ethnicity” was obviously being picked up by mammals.

Well, now there is some research to back this up:

Some species distinguish several species of predator, giving differentiated warning calls and escape reactions; here, we explore an animal’s classification of subgroups within a species. We show that elephants distinguish at least two Kenyan ethnic groups and can identify them by olfactory and color cues independently. In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men demonstrate virility by spearing elephants (Loxodonta africana), but Kamba agriculturalists pose little threat. Elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai. Elephants are therefore able to classify members of a single species into subgroups that pose different degrees of danger.

Here is a picture of elephants upset by exposure to Maasai clothing:

And here’s the data to back it up:

This research demonstrates that elephants discriminate both using olfaction and vision, with these two sources of information processed separately and accurately, to assess risk from different sorts of people. Considering the amount of energy one must spend … and time one must waste .. running away from threats, this does indeed make a lot of sense.

BATES, L. A., SAYIALEL, K. N., NJIRAINI, N. W., MOSS, C. J., POOLE, J. H. & BYRNE, R.W. (2007): Elephants Classify Human Ethnic Groups by Odor and Garment Color.. Curr Biol, , .