Formation of a long trunk in the ancestors of the modern elephant. Without a trunk: elephants without control
The first placental mammals - the ancestors of modern ones - were small animals that fed primarily on insects, small lizards and other carnivorous foods. The main thing that distinguished them from those living today was the lack of specialization in nutrition, movement, etc. All existing mammals today, for example, a tiger, a horse, a monkey, differ sharply from each other in specialization in any direction: the tiger is an obvious predator, the horse is adapted to run fast and eat grass, the whale - to live in water, the monkey - to climb trees. Ancient mammals were not so one-sidedly developed. They were small animals with small brains and vague specializations. Many of them combined characteristics of various orders of mammals; we have already said that ancient ungulates had characteristics of carnivores, and ancient carnivores and primates had characteristics of insectivores.
In the first half of the Tertiary period there was a “disintegration” of the homogeneous kingdom of mammals along different paths of specialization.
Already in the Paleogene - 50-60 million years ago - ancient mammals had differences in their lifestyle and diet: some were better adapted to life on land, others in water, and others in the air. Some adapted to a predatory lifestyle, others to a herbivorous lifestyle.
The first mammals that lived in water appeared: whales and the ancestors of seals, walruses, and sirens. Ancient whales were still small animals, several meters long. They had small front legs-fins. They had many large, serrated teeth. Modern whales are very diverse in structure. Among them are the largest animals, reaching 35 meters in length.
Mammals appeared and bats appeared in the air. But mammals, like reptiles, reached their greatest development on land. Their species, varied in size and lifestyle, arose and spread widely.
Ancient predators, creodonts, adapted to catching live prey, eating meat and chewing bones. Their body became light and flexible, their claws became strong and sharp, their fangs turned into sharp dagger-shaped teeth, and their molars became cutting teeth.
From ancient predators came seals, walruses and other aquatic predators called pinnipeds. On the other hand, some of them gave rise to cats, dogs, martens, bears, and badgers. The greatest development of predatory characteristics is observed in cats. Bears and badgers have partially returned to omnivory, and their predatory characteristics have weakened.
Arboreal insectivores gave rise to monkeys, which we will talk about separately.
Herbivorous mammals have reached great development. The ancestors of various ungulates were the proto-ungulates, or condylartrae, which had predatory features in their structure (claw-shaped hooves, sharp molars and well-developed canines). Two orders of ungulates that emerged from them achieved particular success. These are equids and artiodactyls, the remains of which, in terms of the number and diversity of species, occupy first place among the finds of fossil mammals. Since the history of many ungulates and proboscis mammals is well studied, we will dwell on it in more detail.
Everyone is well aware of only two living representatives of proboscis mammals - Indian and African elephants. And about 400 species of fossil proboscis are known. The peculiar features of proboscideans are clearly expressed: these are huge, forward-directed and differently curved front teeth - incisors. A long, fleshy trunk descends between them, with which they bring food to their mouths and drink water. The body is massive, thick, the legs are straight and columnar. Their height reaches 4 meters.
These features were not yet well expressed in ancient proboscideans. Their history has been traced from the Eocene era to the present day, that is, over 50 million years.
The most ancient proboscis meriteria (named after Lake Meris in Egypt, near which their remains were found) were the size of a donkey; they had a small trunk and two pairs of somewhat elongated incisors - future tusks. Mastodons and Dinotheriums developed from Meriteria.
Mastodons had a massive, low-set body, an elongated head with one or two pairs of straight or slightly curved tusks. The mastodon skull has significantly more prominent facial bones, that is, a more elongated muzzle, than an elephant. Interestingly, newborn and young elephants have a more elongated muzzle than adults. The skull of an adult elephant has an extremely shortened and depressed muzzle, like that of a bulldog. This is a common phenomenon: young animals often have features similar to their ancestors that disappear in adulthood. Mastodon teeth are very different from elephant teeth. Elephants have two huge lateral incisor tusks on the front of the upper jaw. There are no corresponding teeth in the lower jaw. Next is missing teeth - diastema - and then there are wonderful molars. Both jaws, upper and lower, are shortened, and the molars are very large, and therefore at the same time one or two teeth sit in the jaws on each side, below and above. However, elephants have a total of 12 molars, three in each half of the upper and lower jaw. They grow sequentially one after another. When the first tooth wears out, it is pushed forward, a second one moves in its place, and a third one moves in place of the second as it wears out. In young elephants, these teeth are preceded by three small baby teeth, which fall out one after the other over the first 15 years or so. The first permanent root appears in the sixteenth year of life, the second after 5 years, and the third - 20 years after the second and remains until the death of the elephant, which lives 100-150 years. The second remarkable feature of elephant molars is the extraordinary complexity of their structure. In Indian and African elephants, in mammoths and other numerous fossil elephants, the molars have many narrow ridges - up to 27 - located across the crown of the tooth. The number of combs varies among different elephants.
Ancient proboscideans were first common in Africa. Africa was at that time (in the first half of the Tertiary period - in the Paleogene) widely connected with Asia, since there was no Mediterranean Sea in the eastern part. Therefore, the descendants of ancient proboscideans - various mastodons - moved to Asia. As the research of the Soviet paleontologist Academician A. A. Borisyak showed, they had a powerful development here at the beginning of the Neogene. From here they spread to Europe, North America, South America and back to Africa. Remains of various mastodons have been found on all continents, with the exception of Australia and Antarctica. Numerous remains of them were found in the southern regions of the Soviet Union: in Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Kazakhstan. In Europe and Asia, mastodons became extinct at the end of the Tertiary period (in the Pliocene). In Africa they lived until the beginning of the Anthropocene. In the southern parts of North America they lived several thousand years ago, in the modern geological era, and in South America they lived until the 4th century AD. e. and were the subject of hunting by the ancient Indians. In their way of life, mastodons differed from elephants: they were, in contrast, mainly inhabitants not of forests (like the Indian strata) and forest-steppes (like the African elephant and many extinct elephants), but of swampy areas.
The direction of development was different from that of mastodons in the amazing proboscis dinotheriums, which also arose from ancient proboscideans. Dinotherium had a flat head and a pair of lower tusks, steeply curved down. Such tusks were probably used for tearing out plants. These animals reached gigantic sizes - up to 4-5 meters in height. Finds of dinoteria are known in the Upper Tertiary deposits of Africa, Asia, and Southern Europe (Caucasus, Moldova, southern Ukraine).
In the Neogene, some tuberculate-toothed mastodons became increasingly adapted to life in lakes and swamps, and turned into platybelodonts. Platibelodonts developed a long lower jaw, widened in the front part in the form of a huge spoon, equipped with a pair of flat tusks. Such a tool was convenient for “scooping”, like a Shovel, aquatic plants. In their lifestyle they were similar to hippopotamuses.
Platybelodonts were found in Miocene deposits of the Caucasus and Mongolia; Ambelodons, related to them, lived in North America.
Real elephants originate from comb-toothed mastodons - stegodonts - which began to adapt to life in the forest-steppes. This happened in the Pliocene era, several million years ago. In stegodonts, the skull gradually became short and high, the number of teeth decreased, but in return the remaining molars grew larger, their chewing surface became multi-ridged. The teeth became like millstones for grinding large amounts of dry vegetation. There were many species of elephants during the Pliocene and Anthropocene. On the territory of the Soviet Union, remains of large flat-fronted elephants that lived in the Upper Pliocene were found. They then successively developed into giant southern elephants, trogontherian elephants and mammoths. At the same time, they gradually adapted to a colder climate and to eating tough food (first steppe plants, and then polar grasses, sedges and pine needles) and settled further and further to the north. We find the greatest expression of this development in the northern hairy elephant mammoths.
Modern rhinoceroses - the one-horned Indian rhinoceros with a sharp upper lip and the two-horned African rhinoceros with a wide quadrangular mouth - like elephants, are pitiful remnants of a species-rich and widespread group of mammals in the past. Many skeletons, bones and teeth have been preserved from their predecessors in Tertiary and Quaternary deposits. A lot of remains of ancient rhinoceroses were found in Central Asia, which was, apparently, the center of their origin and development. Many remains of various rhinoceroses have been found in the steppes and deserts of Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
In ancient Tertiary times, many rhinoceroses were small, the size of a calf, and, most interestingly, did not have horns. These were hornless rhinoceroses. They were slimmer and more agile animals than their descendants. The remaining features of their skeleton and teeth show us that they are undoubtedly rhinoceroses. However, along with small primitive rhinoceroses, giant rhinoceroses were found in Asia. They also had primitive features in structure, were hornless, but were larger in size than large elephants. In Kazakhstan in 1912, such a giant rhinoceros was first found in Oligocene sediments. It was called indricotherium by academician A. A. Borisyak, who studied it. Indricotherium reached 5 meters in height and was, apparently, the largest animal known to us on land. He had a massive body and thick columnar legs, like an elephant. The beautiful skeleton of Indricotherium is exhibited in Moscow, in the Paleontological Museum of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In recent years, remains of Indricotherium and other giant rhinoceroses have been discovered in many areas of Central Asia and even in the Caucasus.
The remains of rhinoceroses in the Tertiary deposits are numerous and belong to different forms. It is enough to point out that more than 20 of their species are known on the territory of the USSR. The more ancient layers they are found in, the more they differ from modern ones. The first horned rhinoceroses, similar to modern ones, appeared in the Miocene era. These were the two-horned rhinoceroses dicerorhinus, short-legged brachypoteria, chiloteria, etc. Many extinct rhinoceroses had two horns - one behind the other, like the modern African rhinoceros. The base of the horn is a bony bump on the nasal bones of the skull. The horn of rhinoceroses has a fibrous structure; it is not made of bone, like deer, and does not have a bone core, like bulls, goats, and antelopes. Rhinoceroses lived in the Anthropocene, both close to modern ones and different from them. At the beginning of the Anthropocene, there lived such peculiar rhinoceroses as Elasmotherium, with a large horn mounted on a huge bump on the forehead, and not on the nose. Until recently, a contemporary of the mammoth, the two-horned hairy rhinoceros, lived in northern Europe and Asia.
Let us now turn to other equid mammals - horses, whose history has been studied better than any other animal.
Studying the history of horses and other ungulates, the great paleontologist Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevsky not only found out the general course of the historical development of horses, but also gave a correct interpretation of the reasons for this development. In subsequent years, a lot of new data was obtained on the history of horses, which made it possible to clarify and detail the research of V. O. Kovalevsky.
Modern horses - wild and domestic, donkeys, half-donkeys, zebras - are characterized by the following features: light body structure, long single-toed legs, complex structure of molars.
We now know a huge number of fossil horses and horse-like animals and can reliably trace all stages of development from ancient four- and five-toed ancestors to living horses.
The first reliable ancestors of horses were found in the Eocene deposits of North America, where the horse family mainly developed further.
Only a few of their representatives penetrated into the Eastern Hemisphere (Europe, Asia, Africa) - anchitheria, hipparions, ancient horses.
The oldest horses (Eohippus, or Hyracotherium, Orohippus and Epihippus), who lived in the Eocene about 40-50 million years ago, were the size of a wolf or even a fox. They lived in dense, humid forests and ate lush grass and leaves. Their molars were low and simple. Their widely spaced fingers prevented the animal from getting stuck in the soft ground. These ancient horses were not fast. Later, in the Neogene, 15-20 million years ago, with the thinning of forests and the development of steppes, many horses moved into the forest-steppe and steppe and were forced to eat dry herbaceous plants, and also, to escape from predators, run quickly and well on solid soil. In connection with this, the structure of animals also changed.
The body became more flexible, lighter, the legs became longer, and the lateral fingers in them gradually became smaller: from four- and three-fingered, they became single-fingered. In modern horses, only thin bones, called slate bones, have been preserved from the small lateral toes. Eating dry, hard grasses caused an increase in the height of the molars, their structure became more complex and stronger. The animals became larger: from fox-sized Eohipus, they turned into large wild ancient one-toed horses up to 2 meters high.
This basic process of horse development apparently took place in the steppes of North America. In Asia and Europe (including on the territory of the USSR), large numbers of remains of Anchytherium, three-toed forest horses that lived in the Miocene era, were found. In the Upper Miocene and Pliocene, they were replaced here by hipparions that came from America - also three-toed, but with greatly shortened lateral fingers - inhabitants of forest-steppes.
Numerous remains of bones have been preserved from hipparions in many areas of Europe and Asia up to 55-60° N. w. By the end of the Tertiary period (in the upper Pliocene), hipparions in Europe and Asia became extinct, and in their place came one-toed horses from America about a million years ago, which populated almost the entire Eastern Hemisphere from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the southern outskirts of Africa. At the time that one-toed horses arose in North America, it was connected in the north by a land bridge to Asia in the Bering Strait region, and in the south to South America in the Panama Canal region. Through these “bridges” horses, as well as other mammals, could then move from one continent to another. In the process of settling in various places, one-toed horses modified and transformed into different types: some adapted to grassy plains, others to shrubby areas, and others to semi-deserts. In Africa they turned into zebras and donkeys, in South and Central Asia - into half-donkeys, which include kulans, onagers, kiangs, and in Europe and North Africa - into real horses.
The last representatives of true wild horses are the Przewalski's horse, which now lives in small numbers in the semi-deserts of Central Asia, and the tarpan, exterminated by humans, which lived in Ukraine in the last century. The domestication of horses by humans several thousand years ago saved them from final extinction, as happened in America.
When Columbus discovered America, there were no horses there. They were imported from Europe several centuries ago. This is the distant history of horses, these wonderful animals, whose role was enormous in human history.
Perhaps no animal in the world has been as offended as the elephant. These giant herbivores are the largest inhabitants of land, but? Almost nothing. Let's start with the fact that many mistakenly attribute the mammoth ancestor to elephants. But this is fundamentally wrong. Mammoths, mastodons and elephants are completely different families. And who is part of the elephant family? Let's figure it out.
1 Erytherium (60 million years ago)
The ancient ancestors of elephants were by no means such giants. And their trunk was only in outline. The very first pro-elephant that scientists discovered was erytherium. A completely small animal weighed up to 5 kilograms. It was possible to identify it only from individual fragments of the jaw, but this was enough, because it is the teeth that serve as a distinctive feature of proboscideans.
2 Phosphateria (57 million years ago)
Phosphateria is the next in line of the great-great-great of our gray giants. And it is already noticeably larger: from those fragments that have been preserved from the distant times of its existence, one can determine its height (no more than 30 cm) and weight (up to 17 kg). Scientists came to the conclusion that the animal was an omnivore.
3 Meriteria (35 million years ago)
A semi-aquatic animal that lived along the edges of reservoirs, Meriteria, which already had the beginnings of a trunk and long divided incisors, from which elephant tusks are then formed. And yes, they were larger - they weighed up to 250 kg, and reached 1.5 meters at the withers.
4 Bariteria (28 million years ago)
Up to three meters high, with a large skull and fairly developed fangs protruding from under the nose-trunk - if you met a barytherium, it would definitely scare you. Just look at the cost of the fangs, from which in the future tusks will develop, protruding from both the lower and upper jaws - obviously not only for obtaining food!
Around the same time, paleomastodons lived and died out. They were distinguished by obvious elephantine features: the structure of the body, skull, and the presence of tusks, which were no longer involved in chewing. On the lower jaw they were spade-shaped; scientists suspect that animals used them to obtain food in the upper layer of the earth.
6 Deinotherium (17 million years ago)
Strictly speaking, scientists are not sure whether Deinotherium was the ancestor of the elephant. It may well be that this is just a separate branch of evolution that has not survived to this day (but early people saw it, because Deinotherium disappeared 2 million years ago). Well, they were terrible animals: with tusks curved down, a huge trunk, a massive (up to 1.2 m) skull, up to 4.5 meters high!
7 Platybelodon (15 million years ago)
Another representative of the proboscis on the way to modernity acquired formidable tusks protruding forward and a powerful lower jaw with spade teeth. Platybelodons lived, as they now say, everywhere: in America, Eurasia and Africa.
8 Gomphotherium (3.6 million years ago)
Add sharp tusks on the lower jaw to the modern Indian cutie elephant, straighten those on the upper jaw, and you get a gomphotherium. And he won't look so friendly anymore. The tusks of gomphotheriums differed from modern elephants in that they had real tooth enamel!
9 Stegodons (2.6 million years ago)
Height 4 meters, length 8 meters + 3 meters of tusks make these extinct proboscis one of the largest ancestors of elephants. The last specimens were preserved on the island of Flores until 12 thousand years ago in a dwarf form, where hobbits (Homo Florentine) were discovered. The species is so close to modern ones that the elephants of Bardia Park still show features of Stegodons.
10 Primelphas (2.6 million years ago)
And now, finally, we come to the closest relative of elephants - in fact, this is its ancestor, primelfas, or “the first elephant.” It was he who gave rise to the branches of elephants, mammoths and mastodons. Meanwhile, it didn’t look much like a modern elephant, since it had four tusks, but what can you do, it’s still related.
1. This is what Meriteria, one of the first representatives of proboscis, looked like (news.bbc.co.uk).
The earliest ancestors of modern elephants appeared about 60 million years ago - just five million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. These were piglet-sized animals, with enlarged incisors that looked like very small tusks. 35 million years ago, ancient relatives of elephants lived in swamps and shallow waters and already resembled small hippopotamuses. In the process of evolution, the nose and upper lip were connected (apparently to make it easier to breathe under water), forming something like a trunk. The number of extinct species of proboscis exceeds 170, and among them there were real giants weighing up to 24 tons. Relatively recently (by geological standards) mastodons, stegodons and mammoths became extinct. The last mammoths known to science lived on Wrangel Island and became extinct only 3.5 thousand years ago. The only non-extinct representatives of the proboscis order are two genera of elephants: Indian (one species) and African (two species: savannah elephant and forest elephant).
The relationship between elephants and people has been dramatic since time immemorial. Thus, one of the hypotheses for the extinction of mammoths is their extermination by ancient man during an uncontrolled hunt. Throughout historical time, elephant hunting also flourished, but not for meat, but for the purpose of extracting “ivory” (tusks) and trade in products made from them. Despite the fact that elephants remain the most “representative” of living land animals (a stuffed 11-ton elephant is on display at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid), the number of eared giants is steadily decreasing. The rapid reduction in the area of places suitable for their habitat also plays an important role. Today, almost all wild elephants live in nature reserves and other protected areas.
Den Den (letter to the Editor): I would like to ask three questions that arose after visiting the Museum. Darwin in Moscow: 1) How do scientists determine whether the first creatures on earth are predators or non-predators, traces of which remain only in fossils (there is no way to determine by teeth, as I understand it)? and what evolutionary factors contributed to the emergence of predators or non-predators from simple single-celled organisms? 2) As I understand it, there were two large extinctions of creatures - and what was the reason for the first extinction? (by the second I mean the extinction of dinosaurs). 3) The ancestors of living animals were very surprised - what factors contributed to the growth of the elephant’s trunk? Need to water yourself in hot weather and get food from trees? Thanks in advance for your answers!
Stanislav Drobyshevsky:1) There are a huge number of modern creatures that eat in a variety of ways. By comparing ancient remains with modern known ones, one can learn about nutrition even from footprints, phalanges and ribs. Sometimes not so much is retained, and the oral apparatus is more or less established, so the type of nutrition can be determined. Factors in the occurrence of predation are the availability of a resource, that is, those who can be eaten. If there is food available, sooner or later there will be someone who will eat it. Being a predator is beneficial in its own way, because you can get a lot of calories at once.
2) As I understand it, you are talking about the Permian-Triassic extinction. You can read in detail about its reasons in Eskov’s book “Amazing Paleontology”. And the short gist is this: continents from a single Pangea began to spread out, the climate began to change, and besides, insects with aquatic larvae appeared, which carried phosphorus and other trace elements from the waters to watersheds. At the same time, plants emerged with normal roots that anchored the soils, preventing them from flowing back into the waters. In total, this led to a phytoplankton crisis (algae lacked microelements), hence the zooplankton crisis, hence the extinction of all higher trophic levels.
3) The ancestors of elephants looked like something like a tapir; with their lack of care, they raked aquatic plants into their mouths. Further - more, the trunk turned out to be a very useful multifunctional tool, and so it grew to its current splendor.
Vadim: Please explain/correct: the main (only?) carrier of hereditary information, the DNA chain (at least the genes in the coding part) can be associated with a description of a set of building blocks proteins (or instructions for their manufacture) from which an organism is built. Where and how in the zygote is the information about when, where and what proteins are required, i.e. architectural diagram of the future organism, program of gene expression (on/off), cell differentiation, etc.? In DNA? How is it possible to encrypt an insanely huge amount of information about the structure of an organism from trillions of complexly interacting cells in several billion virtually binary values? Thank you.
Svetlana Borinskaya: The body's development program, encoded in DNA, does not work by itself. To implement it, we need “triggering” signals that come from the cell and from the external environment (for mammals, signals from the outside go through the mother’s body). "Architecture" is determined by the sequence of gene activation. And this sequence, in turn, is determined by signals from other genes and from the cytoplasm of cells. Signals can come in the form of regulatory proteins that bind to DNA and turn genes on or off, or in the form of special small RNA molecules (microRNAs) that do not encode proteins but are involved in regulating the processes of their synthesis. The development process is not strictly determined, it is probabilistic and based on commands “if...” => “do this.” “If” means the concentrations of proteins, microRNAs and some important metabolites in cells, the presence of certain signaling molecules, and “do so” means turning on/off certain groups of genes. The operation of specific sets of genes leads to cell growth, differentiation and morphogenesis (the movement of cells, as well as the programmed death of desired groups of cells).
Consistent, more or less coordinated implementation of commands leads to the formation of a body diagram.
More details can be found in textbooks, for example Gilbert S. Developmental Biology in (3 volumes), his text is available on the Internet.
Letter to the editor: A short question to Alexander Markov - what, in his opinion, are the reasons why the human brain began to shrink over the last 20 thousand years, and most importantly, how, with the help of what selection mechanism, in his opinion, could this happen? Could this process be influenced by the difficult human birth compared to animals? And is childbirth really more difficult in humans and more dangerous for the mother’s life than in other mammals?
Alexander Markov: I can’t speak for all mammals, but it’s definitely more difficult and dangerous than other great apes (see, for example:
Karen Rosenberg, Wenda Trevathan, 1995. Bipedalism and human birth: The obstetrical dilemma revisited). Theoretically, this circumstance could favor selection for smaller brains, as well as selection for having children at earlier stages of development. In addition, a large brain requires large energy expenditures for its work, and most importantly, for its development. This leads to an increase in the burden on parents, and, accordingly, to a decrease in the average number of children that a pair of parents can raise. Therefore, we would expect that if for some reason the positive effect of a large brain on fitness (i.e., survival and reproductive efficiency) is reduced, then the brain will shrink.
I outlined my thoughts on the possible causes of brain shrinkage over the last 20-30 millennia in the book “Human Evolution” (volume 2, chapter 4). Here's a quote from there:
"...As long as there are not very many memes in the environment, intelligence sharply increases competitiveness. However, the advantages of high intelligence are smoothed out when the environment is saturated with easily accessible memes. An evolutionary reduction of intelligence can also occur in the case when the dependence of reproductive success on the number of acquired memes becomes weaker ... According to the authors, both are observed in modern humanity. Therefore, there is every reason to expect that if there is an evolution of the mind in the human population now, it is not directed towards becoming wiser, but just the opposite.
As sad as it may be, this model prediction is confirmed by anthropological data. Record average brain volumes were achieved by sapiens at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic (about 40–25 thousand years ago). From then until today, the average volume of the human brain has changed, if at all, in the direction of decrease. According to S.V. Drobyshevsky, about 27–25 thousand years ago, the average volume of the human brain began to decrease. Starting 10 thousand years ago, this trend became especially noticeable. This may be partly due to climate change, since our species “has, although not strict, a clear pattern of increasing body length and brain mass during periods of glaciation and decreasing during periods of warming” (Drobyshevsky, 2010). 10–12 thousand years ago, the next interglacial period just began - a warm period between glaciations. But another interpretation is also possible. The Upper Paleolithic “cultural revolution” led to a dramatic increase in the amount of useful information passed down from generation to generation through cultural inheritance. In other words, people began to receive much more valuable knowledge and skills from their parents and fellow tribesmen. The cultural environment became so saturated with useful memes that in the future, people apparently no longer needed such high intelligence as before to survive and reproduce successfully. If you don’t need to figure out everything with your mind and adults spoon-feed you a huge amount of ready-made useful knowledge in childhood, then you can get by with a smaller brain, since it is such an expensive organ. The same thing can be formulated in a more optimistic manner: thanks to the development of culture, people began to use their brain more efficiently, and therefore its mass became less important than the “quality of content”. In addition, as labor specialization developed, knowledge and skills were distributed among community members. You don’t have to remember everything yourself if you can ask a “specialist” at any time. All this could lead to the fact that the evolutionary trend toward brain enlargement, which began over two million years ago, went into reverse with the rise of culture."
Vadim: Please tell me if there are articles, studies, scientific works or at least some reliable information about the connection between geography and blood groups of representatives of different countries / nations / archaeological finds of ancient people and an analysis of this connection.
Svetlana Borinskaya: Research into the geography of the distribution of blood groups was started by the Hirschfeld spouses during World War I. They determined the blood type of the soldiers and at the same time asked where they were from.
In the 1950s, the English researcher Arthur Mourant created an atlas of frequencies of different blood groups in the population of different countries, which is considered a classic work: Mourant A.E., Kopec A.C., Domaniewska-Sobczak K. (1976) The distribution of the human blood groups and other polymorphisms. London: Oxford University Press. 1055 p. (first edition in 1954)
L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, one of the most famous population geneticists in the world, used Murant’s data in his book “The History and Geography of Human Genes” (Cavalli-Sforza LL, Menozzi P, Piazza A (1992) The History and Geography of Human Genes. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 413 p.)
Blood typing is now moving from serological methods to direct DNA analysis, so we can expect more detailed genetic data to become available. However, even without this, blood groups are among the most studied human characteristics at the population level.
For the population of the former USSR, information on the distribution of blood groups is summarized in the book “Gene pool and genogeography of population” (Edited by Yu.G. Rychkov). Volume 1. Gene pool of the population of Russia and neighboring countries. SPb.: Science. 2000. 611 p.
Examples of determining blood groups by DNA in ancient remains:
Halverson MS, Bolnick DA. An ancient DNA test of a founder effect in Native American ABO blood group frequencies.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2008 Nov;137(3):342-7. ABO blood group Sato et al. Polymorphisms and allele frequencies of the ancient DNA gene among the Jomon, Epi-Jomon and Okhotsk people in Hokkaido, northern Japan, revealed by
analysis. J Hum Genet. 2010 Oct;55(10):691-6.
Ivan Grukhin: Modern measurement methods (such as an accelerator mass spectrometer, for example) make it possible to determine the radioactivity of a sample quite quickly, within hours. However, before the measurement itself, it is necessary to prepare the sample. In the case of radiocarbon dating, it is necessary to separate the carbon of the sample from foreign carbon that got into the sample while it was in the ground for thousands of years. And then this carbon should be converted into a form suitable for a measuring device (for example, graphite). For different materials, sample preparation methods are different, and the time that such preparation takes is also different. For bones, for example, it averages about a month. For luminescence dating methods, it is important to isolate a mineral with suitable properties, such as quartz. This allocation can also take weeks. Each dating method has its own characteristics, but the general rule is that the measurement itself takes place relatively quickly (hours to days), but sample preparation takes a much longer time (weeks).
mocking expression “Russia is the birthplace of elephants” arose back in Soviet times in the late 1940s. Then a whole campaign against pro-Western sentiments and “rootless cosmopolitans” unfolded in the country. One of the manifestations of this struggle was a fierce desire to attribute many scientific, technical and cultural priorities to either Russia or the USSR (they say that it was our people who were the first to invent the airplane and bicycle, the law of conservation of energy and even the theory of relativity). The storyteller E. Schwartz spoke well about the next unbridled surge of “patriotism”:
“Do you know why “Dragon” (his play - S.K.) was banned? The city is liberated by a certain Lancelot, who assures that he is a distant relative of the famous knight, beloved of Queen Guenievre. Now, if instead I had shown Titus Zyablik, a distant relative of Alyosha Popovich, everything would have been easier...”
It must be said that this trend was not original. The desire to spur one's exclusivity in similar ways can be observed in almost all countries (for example, in Turkey during the time of Ataturk). Moreover, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the intensity of the nationalist “trash and frenzy” only intensified and acquired the character of complete anti-scientific nonsense. Suddenly it turned out that it is your nation that stands at the foundation of world civilization, has the most ancient and correct language and attitude to all great achievements.
A still from the film “The Koloboks Are Conducting the Investigation.”
Well, this is what we see every day. Another funny thing is that there really were elephants in Russia, and in huge numbers. However, they were found on almost all continents - with the exception of Australia and Antarctica, which broke away early. Modern elephants are just pitiful remnants of the former greatness of the proboscis order.
It started, as always, small. Somewhere 40 million years ago (during the late Eocene), the ancestors of proboscideans called Meriteria lived in Africa. They bore little resemblance to their descendants - they were no larger than a pig, instead of a trunk they had an elongated snout, and instead of luxurious tusks, they had only noticeably protruding incisors (and on both jaws at once). Apparently, the first proboscideans led an amphibious lifestyle, like hippopotamuses (perhaps these conditions stimulated the extension of the nose as a breathing tube).
Meriteria.
A later representative of proboscideans, the Oligocene Platybelodon (in our opinion, “shoveltooth”), also led a similar lifestyle. It had already reached a height of 3 meters, and the incisors on the lower jaw really resembled horizontal blades, with the help of which it apparently dug out and raked up aquatic vegetation.
Platybelodon.
At the same time, mastodons roamed the land, already reminiscent in their appearance of the usual elephants. They had a massive, highly elongated skull, an impressive trunk and protruding tusks, which were also preserved on the lower jaw (though they were smaller there).
Mastodons.
One of the most unusual proboscideans was Dinotherium (“terrible beast”), living in the Miocene and Pliocene eras. He looked quite elephantine, and the only “terrible” things about his appearance were his size (up to 4.5 m in height) and remarkable tusks. For some reason they grew only on the lower jaw and stuck out not forward, but downward - almost at a right angle. Scientists still don’t really know why Dinotherium needs such a “rake.”
Dinotherium.
The peak of the proboscis heyday occurred in the Pleistocene. During this era, the order reaches such a wide distribution and species diversity that it is not without reason that it is called the “age of elephants.” At the same time, proboscideans reach their maximum size. Today it is believed that the largest land mammal in the history of the Earth was not the hornless rhinoceros Indricotherium, as previously believed, but an elephant called Palaeoloxodon namadicus. Based on the found hip, scientists estimated the height of paleoxodon to be 5.2 m and its weight to be 22 tons (i.e., the same as 3-4 modern African elephants).
Palaeoloxodon namadicus.
However, the most famous and “promoted” prehistoric proboscis remains to this day woolly mammoths(it’s enough to remember the “Ice Age” cartoon series). Firstly, these elephants have been very well studied - their remains are found in abundance in Europe, North America and especially Siberia. Thanks to this, Russia even became one of the ivory exporting countries (especially after the ban on hunting African elephants). And the word “mammoth” itself passed into other languages from Russian. Linguists put forward different theories about its origin. For example, that at first it came from the Mansi “mang ont” (“earthen horn”), and then became closer in sound to the name of the Christian saint - Mamant.
Woolly mammoths.
No matter how they tried to explain the origin of these bones in ancient times! The indigenous peoples of Siberia considered them to be the remains of a giant deer, which fell into the ground up to its chest and, thus wandering, paved river beds. Those familiar with the Bible argued that this was a beast that did not fit into Noah's ark. Well, some Christians even passed off mammoth bones as the relics of saints - for example, the tooth of St. Christopher or the thigh of St. Vincent.
The permafrost perfectly preserved not only the bones of mammoths, but also entire carcasses. In the hall of the St. Petersburg Zoo Museum you can still see a stuffed so-called. “Beryozovsky” mammoth, discovered in Yakutia on the banks of the Berezovka River in 1900.
Stuffed Berezovsky mammoth.
And already in my childhood, the discovery of the Kirgilyakh mammoth, better known under the nickname “Baby Mammoth Dima,” created a lot of noise. The fact is that this unfortunate cub, discovered in 1977 in the Magadan region, preserved not only soft tissues, but even red blood cells and stomach contents.
Mammoth Dima.
Perhaps it was this find that served as a source of inspiration for the creators of the cartoon “Mother for the Baby Mammoth” (1981) with the well-known song by Vladimir Shainsky.
“Baby Mammoth Dima” was considered the best-preserved specimen of a mammoth until 2007, when “Baby Mammoth Lyuba” was found on the Yamal Peninsula. There were even a few strands of reddish fur left on her body.
Baby mammoth Lyuba.
Joke:
Three mammoths are grazing, and then a herd of elephants appears in the distance. One of the mammoths raises his head:
- Guys, atas are skinheads!!!
Yes, mammoths were very furry animals. Which is understandable if we remember that they lived in an era of sharp cooling, when the cap of polar glaciers began to advance on the continents. Amazingly, these large (up to 4 m in height and weighing 10-12 tons) creatures managed to adapt well to the “Great Winter”. Their ears became smaller, but thick hair grew on their body, a solid layer of fat formed under the skin, and a hump of fat appeared on their back. Another distinctive feature was the very high skull with a characteristic rounded top.
Mammoths lived in forest-tundra conditions, where they ate steppe grasses and tree branches. And the huge four-meter tusks apparently helped these animals tear off bark and tear apart snow in search of food.
Mammoths.
It is generally accepted that mammoths greatly helped our primitive ancestors in the harsh conditions of the so-called. "Ice Age". Few doubt that people hunted these giants. But we can only speculate about the methods and scope of this hunt. The popular belief about the massacre of mammoths, which led the species to extinction, is probably an exaggeration. Even armed with a “firearm,” hunters did not manage to “zero” African elephants in two centuries. What can we say about people whose most effective hunting trick could only be a dug hole.
Drawing of a Paleolithic mammoth (from the Rouffignac cave).
Among other reasons for the extinction of woolly mammoths, scientists name an epidemic, genetic degeneration, a sharp change in the food supply due to climate warming, and much more. One way or another, about 10 thousand years ago these northern giants almost completely disappeared. Although in some places (for example, on Wrangel Island) the species of dwarf mammoth still survived, which became extinct later - about 4 thousand years ago. Some even believe that it was the skulls of dwarf mammoths, which were once found in Sicily and Crete, that gave rise to legends about one-eyed giants - Cyclops (the large nasal cavity in the skull could be mistaken for an eye socket).
The “Age of Elephants” is over, and today only two species live on Earth - African and Asian (or Indian). Despite the general similarity, even a child can distinguish them.
Let's start with the fact that the African elephant is larger than the Asian one (the first has a maximum height of 4 meters and a weight of 7 tons, the second has a maximum height of 3 meters and a weight of 5 tons). This difference is due, first of all, to the fact that the first species lives mainly in the open areas of the savannah, while the second prefers to wander through the forests. However, African elephants also have a subspecies that prefers forest life. Therefore, it is also smaller than its steppe counterpart (up to 2.5 m at the shoulders).
Female African forest elephant with calf.
If we come across representatives of two species that are similar in size, then we need to look at the head. The African species is much more protruding, while the Asian one has smaller ears, more pointed in shape, and their ends never touch each other. Male Asian elephants have much shorter tusks (up to 1.5 m), while females, as a rule, have no tusks at all. The trunk has one growth at the end, while the African species has two. In addition, the Asian’s skull has a noticeable elevation, which makes him look “brow-browed and smarter” than the African.
Asian and African elephants.