Bertolt Brecht once described the elephant with the laconic statement: “It does something for art: it supplies ivory.” However, the elephants now seem to refuse this service to art on principle.
African savannah elephants have recently been born in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, often without tusks - at least the female animals.
Bulls, on the other hand, are less common because the mutation that causes the lack of tusks is fatal for the males.
How can this actually disadvantageous mutation prevail?
Humans are responsible for dismantling their tusks, specifically the parties to the Mozambican civil war. This is the conclusion of researchers in the journal
Science
. Ivory poaching financed the war there between 1977 and 1992 - unfortunate who showed their tusks. The consequence: evolution through human-driven selection. Such a process is not unique, for example the selection pressure of trophy hunters in some places turned the North American bighorn sheep into narrow-horned sheep.
More often, however, it is a species like a relative of the African elephant: the mammoth, if you will, also did something for early human art as a prominent motif in cave painting - the outcome of the relationship is well known.
Since this year, the African forest elephant has also been regarded as critically endangered, and the savannah elephant as endangered.
Brecht would probably have been astonished that the human fingerprint was already shown in the phenotype of the latter in Mozambique: the tusk deficit turned the elephant from being an involuntary promoter of culture into a product of culture.