Ancient Elephants Followed the (Female) Leader
Baku, March 9 (AZERTAC). When a herd of prehistoric elephants walked through mud in the Arabian Desert about 7 million years ago, its members unwittingly left their footprints—and clues about their social lives—behind. Those prints now reveal how the herd behaved: Just like modern elephants, mature males meandered on their own while the rest of the herd apparently followed a female leader.
Researchers have long wondered when modern elephants began living in matriarchal groups in which females and young follow a female leader while males disperse when they reach sexual maturity. Today, both African and Asian elephants live in complex matriarchal groups, so scientists have hypothesized that their common ancestor 5 million to 7 million years ago also lived in a female-led herd of Proboscidea (the order that includes living elephants and several extinct families), says paleontologist William Sanders of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the new work.
With the discovery of a remarkable 260-meter-long trackway, researchers can now get a glimpse of how some prehistoric elephants moved across the landscape at the site of Mleisa 1 in the
This behavior suggests that 7 million years ago, the elephants lived in sex-segregated groups as they do today, says team member Faysal Bibi of the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin. And if mature males rejoined the herd only to mate, that suggests that herds followed female leaders, also as they do today.
The contrast in size and mass deduced for the male elephant that walked alone "does suggest that the herd was matriarchal," says Sanders. "These footprints are truly wonderful," adds ethologist Phyllis Lee of the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. "They capture the behavior of large animals at one moment in time from millions of years ago and which we can clearly interpret in the context of well-known modern animal behavior."
In the meantime, though, the paper demonstrates that researchers can use tracks to reconstruct prehistoric behavior, along with fossils and teeth, Bibi says. "Most of the time in paleontology one doesn`t get such a direct behavioral window onto the biology of an animal."
Other news in this section
