Sunday, December 27, 2020

Ivory From A 16th-Century Shipwreck

 From Smithsonian:

An interdisciplinary effort involving archaeologists, geneticists and ecologists, the paper was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. By extracting genetic material from the tusks’ cells, the researchers were able to identify the ivory’s source as forest elephants. The team then analyzed mitochondrial DNA to determine that the elephants whose tusks sank with the ship came from 17 distinct herds in West Africa.

“Elephants live in female-led family groups, and they tend to stay in the same geographic area throughout their lives,” lead author Alida de Flamingh, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tells Victoria Gill of BBC News. “We were able to reconstruct complete mitochondrial genomes from these really old samples.”

When the scientists compared their findings to genetic information about African elephants today, they could only identify 4 of the 17 herds. This decline probably reflects the extinction of elephant families long threatened by the ivory trade and the destruction of their habitats.

African forest elephants are smaller than their savanna cousins. Today, they continue to face threats from humans seeking ivory. According to the African Wildlife Foundation, poachers have killed more than 60 percent of the animals over the past decade; the species now occupies just a quarter of its historic range. Most forest elephants live in jungle environments, but a chemical analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in the 16th-century tusks showed that they once lived in a mixed woodland and grassland savanna. (Read more.)


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