LAUSR

Significance Why did humans, and no other animal, develop the complement of complex cultures, languages, and tools? Answering this question is one of the most important endeavors of modern science, which can shed light not only on our distinctive cognitive and behavioral phenotype, but also on the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to it. A promising theory, the human self-domestication hypothesis, suggests that humans’ uniqueness is the outcome of an evolutionary process of selection against aggression. While compelling, this theory is hard to test: Besides humans, only one other species (bonobos) has been argued to be self-domesticated. Our work suggests that elephants may also be self-domesticated, leading to exciting future research on the evolutionary similarities between humans and other species beyond the primate order.