2023届高三英语二轮复习每日阅读打卡 DAY 24 Wild lives专题（选自NewScientist）

每日阅读打卡 DAY 24 Wild lives专题（选自NewScientist） They found that all three species display similar behaviours and share certain physical features. Like bonobos and humans, elephants are social, play, have a long childhood and care for the offspring of others in their group. Wild African elephants’ also share a shortened jawbone – a trait shared by many domesticated animals – and show restraint in aggression toward others. Next, the researchers looked for commonalities between the genome of domesticated animals and the genome of wild elephants. By drawing on studies of 261 mammals such as cattle, dogs, cats and horses, they built a list of genes frequently associated with domestication. They then identified 674 genes as having a high likelihood of being passed down from earlier elephant generations. The team found that 79 of those African elephant genes were associated with domestication in other species, further strengthening the idea that elephants evolved these traits without the direct intervention of people. This is significant, says Raviv, because elephants and humans are not closely related, suggesting domestication can evolve convergently in multiple branches of the mammal evolutionary tree. Raviv suspects Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) may also show signs of self-domestication, but genome data was only available for African elephants at the time of the research. She says it is possible that other highly intelligent, social animals like dolphins, whales and parrots have also evolved self-domestication Melinda Zeder at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC takes issue with the term self-domestication. Domestication is a mutual process between two species, which means no species could do it alone, she says. “There are parallels to domestication that are interesting to explore, but by branding it as domestication, they’re muddying the waters.” Raviv says though self-domestication might seem like “a pretty wacky idea”, it is still wo