Interesting fact: there’s actually a specific phenomenon in modern-day elephants that explains the idea of males being more reckless. Modern elephant males periodically go through a process called musth . It’s sort of like the male version of going into heat. Their testosterone goes up like 60x and they become aggressive and even violent. They’ll even attack humans and other animals with little warning. A guide at Kruger national park in South Africa mentioned that they once had a spree of young bull elephants going into musth and attacking and breaking the spines of rhinoceros. I imagine if mammoths also went through musth they wouldn’t be particularly cautious about terrain hazards and the like
They all died, male and female alike, but a higher percent of the males left behind fossils. Meaning getting yourself killed is only part of the equation. The other part is that the manner in which you get yourself killed has to increase the odds of fossilization.
Maybe an elephant in musth chasing rhinos pays less attention to where it's going and accidentally get itself trapped in a tar pit.
Or there are biochemical processes that prefer preservation of male specimens, for example the prehistoric version of male hormones acting as a preservative, or perhaps the prehistoric version of the female horomone acting as a cue for insects or decomposers in the ecosystem to consume the carcass etc.
Bigger bones with higher calcium content? Or higher ratio of calcium to something else?
But I can also totally buy that it’s mostly a function of where they die. Like dying in a bog might preserve the bones differently than dying in a forest or by a lake or whatever.
Women probably more likely to die in childbirth or with a group of family members and end up being properly buried. I think most soils aren't conductive to preservation. Thus anyone given proper funeral rites wont end up as a fossil.
Mammoths and Mastodons seem like even more dangerous elephants (especially aesthetically with their giant horns). So I wouldn't be surprised they acted similarly.
Maybe that sort of thing played a role in various big game species extinction in many places. They seemed scarier, and/or actually were more aggressive during certain phases like Musking.
I’m actually not sure. Based on the Wikipedia page, bulls in musth emit a characteristic low-pitched tone that females in heat seem to respond to. And the testosterone levels wouldn’t hurt sperm production. I don’t know much beyond the Wikipedia page and some information I learned from some guides, but it sounds like the exact evolutionary advantage/purpose isn’t well understood. It’s interesting that the females also go into heat. The musth certainly seems like the male analogue of heat. And the male aggression is certainly similar to what you see in some other herd animals during mating season (aka rutting, though I don’t know enough to be able to compare the aggression levels of musth with that of a rutting deer or bison). Elephants in musth will fight other elephants, and unlike normal mating dominance fights they will try to really kill the other. Part of me wonders if this is a part of natural selection. A grown bull elephant doesn’t really have any predators, except another bull elephant in musth.
Another interesting fact about musth is it seems to effect elephant society. When young males reach adulthood and leave the herd of females, they tend to form small “bachelor herds” consisting of a few other young males and an older male, who “shows them the ropes”. And one of the things the older male teaches them is self control during musth. The Wikipedia article, and a story a guide told me, mention that young males in musth without an older male presence to help guide them (teach them?) will be more aggressive.
Towards the end of the article they state a second hypothesis that seems to be ignored in these comments but pretty plausible: people kept the larger examples they found, skewing the collections in favor of size, and thus males over females.
Of course, there could be more than one selection effect at work.
AFAIK, animals where there is stronger competition among males for females tend to have more of a size difference. Species that are purely pair bonding tend to have animals of similar sizes. Humans have relatively little size difference compared to other mammalian species. There are many spider species where the male is smaller.
>They figured it was more probable that young male mammoths were much more likely to travel solo, away from the wisdom and protection of matriarchal herds, similar to the way elephant societies function today. In other words, these male mammoths—young, reckless, foolhardy—were just more likely to get into some kind of trouble and die, from getting stuck in a pit to running afoul of hunting humans. Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains. “They were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits,” Gower says.
Running afoul of hunting humans should leave fewer remains than, for instance, an elephant graveyard. Now it's possible mammoths didn't do the graveyard thing, but the point is the humans would have left far less of the animal than an elephant grave or a bog.
The elephant graveyard thing is actually a myth; elephants do not seek out some specific location when they sense death is near. In fact, one of the theories I’ve heard for how this myth got started was European explorers coming across sites where the local elephant hunters stockpiled their bones and ivory, and assumed this was a natural phenomenon.
Elephants and other animals don't leave graves. They just die and decompose on the surface. That's why you won't easily find a graveyard for animals, unless they happen to be buried by some accident.
A little bit off topic, but as I understand it, Elephants are known to carry the bones of deceased elephants with them, and otherwise move them around.
They might not have graveyards, but they do appear to have some concept of mortality.
From this great article [1] on elephants:
> Even bare, bleached old elephant bones will stop a group if they have not seen them before. It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it.
>It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it.
If they're truly reacting with similar emotions as when a human stumbles across a human corpse or skeleton, this seems kind of cruel to deliberately do just to get a compelling film shot.
It does seem like contact with humans wouldn't leave much in the way of remains (plus wouldn't humans go after less reckless prey?), but definitely tar pits and the like would be more likely to snare a risk-tolerant and solitary animal than a risk-averse one in a group.
There's probably some of the former. Many fossilizing environments are more dangerous, and sometimes in surprising ways that more cautious--or experienced--individuals would avoid or approach more carefully. Tar pits, caves and crevasses, river banks, wetlands.
I saw a program once about elephants that showed that they carried around the bones of the revered loved ones in their mouths. Maybe the males were not as revered or maybe they tended to die in spots that it was dangerous to get to carry away their bones.
The article mentions they use DNA testing to determine the sex and also that it's tough to find usable DNA samples. Could it be possible that male fossils are more likely to have usable DNA and thus bias the results?
Likely they did, but I don't think we have the DNA to know for sure. Even if we did have some trapped in amber inside insects like in Jurassic Park, we couldn't link to bones.
On Land of the Lost "Grumpy" was called he and "Alice" was called she, but I don't think anyone knew their sex for sure. "Alice" was an Allosaurus.
Well, the dinosaurs that are alive today do, at least. For other dinosaurs, we've only fairly recently realized we have soft tissue and maybe DNA in lots of fossils. So, maybe, but we don't know yet.
Seems unlikely. Honestly, I'm surprised that the male to female ratio is anywhere near 1:1. Every male baby is one less womb, and one less branch on the evolutionary tree.
Does anybody know why it's so close to 1:1 instead of women outnumbering men? Specifically in non-pair-bonding species?
I just googled it out of curiosity and I gather from Wikipedia, if a species has more females, the families with male children will reproduce more than the families with female children, and the give birth to male genes will then rise up to 50 percent of the population.
Weird. It seems like the female children would almost always propagate their genes, while the male children would either rise to the top and have many children or lose the competition and have very few or none.
It's always weirded me out for harem species in particular... the odds of producing a male that is competitive enough to be a harem leader seems pretty low.
Even in harem species, on average, each male gets exactly the same number of offspring as a female. If say 75% of the specimen would be female, being a male would yield on average thrice as much children compared to a female, so it would be evolutionary beneficial to be male.
The only species where the ratio is different are those where sex is determined with different genetic mechanisms. For example, in hymenoptera (ants and wasps), males are born from unfertilized eggs, which results in a 1:3 ratio between females and males.
Ah. The on average bit is what I was missing. It keeps going against my intuition though... like: on average, buyers of lottery tickets get back ~90% of their investment.
I guess the difference between lottery tickets and genetics is that one is compulsory, with no benefit whatsoever for not playing.
If you are a member of a species with 3 females to every 1 male, that means the average male of your species has 3 times as many offspring as the average female.
Under those circumstances, if you have a mutation that causes you to produce all male offspring, you will have many more grandchildren than average.
This pressure will always favor producing whatever sex is in short supply, pushing sex ratios to 50%.
There is some sort of math behind why a 1:1 ratio is almost always selected for. It intuits like, if all of the other elephants are breeding 1:2, and you breed 2:1, you will be significantly more likely to spread your genes.
Fossils aren't bone. They're mineral deposits in the space the bone used to be. In rare cases there might be some original tissue but for the most part fossils are formed from sediment(?) infill. Preserved bones are...bones and not fossils. Think of fossilization like lost-wax casting.
AFAIK bone loss occurs with age in both men and women, but accelerates for women after menopause. But did female dinosaurs have something like menopause?
>> This wasn’t a surprise, based on what Pečnerová had theorized about mammoth herd behavior, since bison social structure similarly isolates young males. “By [the mammoth] anology, some of the male bison are going off and doing stupid things,”
Which could be interpreted as misandry even though they blame the males for their fate in the same sentence. :-)
My complaint is the anthropomorphization of animals.
Unless we know what drove animal behavior, we cannot make such attributions.
It would be like saying dinosaurs raped each other. From a human perspective their mating behavior if we knew it might look negative, but we cannot attribute intent to animals like that.
Frankly I think you're reading what you want to read here. I get that those are hot button issues for many people but here I really think it's just a small joke because, as you point out, obviously the distribution of fossils has very little to do with gender politics.
That being said if you want to take it more seriously sometime sexist bias does taint research in unexpected places, such as expecting that certain tools would've been used by males instead of females for no real reason for instance. It's important to be aware of these biases if you want to do good scientific work I think.
>That being said if you want to take it more seriously sometime sexist bias does taint research in unexpected places
Similar to lets-discover-sexism-everywhere bias in social sciences though. In general soft sciences are prone to the ideology of the day (which is also what gets you grants)...
They probably meant misogyny from today's archeologists rather than from bisons and mammoths. There are known instances of gender stereotypes influencing archeological discovery. For example: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/09/viking-warri...
> Since the remains were found alongside swords, arrowheads, a spear, and two sacrificed horses, archaeologists had considered it a warrior’s grave—and, thus, a man’s.
Even with that possibility it’s ridiculous. It would require a conspiracy by archeologists (of both sexes) to only find male specimens (as if there are so many that they’d ignore female specimens just to be misogynistic. How realistic is that?
It also primes the reader to think “aha misogyny!” where it isn’t. Just as saying fat free water!
You keep repeating this as if fatty water were an entirely bizare notio. Suppose you heard of... milk? And militant vegans? And soy-milk?
I haven't seen soy-milk claiming to be gluten free, but I have definitely seen many milk products claiming to be lactose free. And I'm bad at drawing analogies, because I don't know what drove the author.
For sake of the argument I'd say that any investigation a male bias could be spun into into an investigation of male surpremacy. So your trying to claim male rhinoceros were better at dying, is it?!?
> it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.
> This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.
And that's just looking at the first hits on a search engine.
Whether or not there is indeed a systemic bias in archeology, this makes it worth mentioning that in that case, we're sure it's not bias.
Man if that spoils an article for you, you must live a pretty miserable life.
Not surprised a comment like this isn't dead on this site. It adds nothing to the discussion, and it seems like OP didn't even read the article and is flame baiting.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
>What I’m reading here is feminine good, masculine bad.
I think that's an oversimplification. Males of most mammal species are more aggressive than females.
As David Eagleman[0] points out (WRT to one mammal species):
"Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong…
Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not:
Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed
Annually in the United States
Offense
Carrying the genes Not carrying the genes
Aggravated assault
3,419,000 435,000
Homicide
14,196 1,468
Armed robbery
2,051,000 157,000
Sexual assault
442,000 10,000
In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.
About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.
We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.
By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male."
>i know this is supposed to be a bit of a gotcha but there really are specific genes (not chromosomes) that are strongly correlated with violent crime:
It's not supposed to be a gotcha at all.
My point (as I stated in the first sentence of my comment) was that male mammals tend to be more aggressive. That implies violence, but also taking more risks as well.
I'd also point out that the article[0] you linked doesn't cover the broad outline that Eagleman presents:
"The authors of the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, said at least 5-10% of all violent crime in Finland could be attributed to individuals with these genotypes." [emphasis added]
The point I was making (and that of the quote I included)was male behavior vs. female behavior -- which is directly related to the discussion of how and why vastly more male mammoth skeletons have been preserved as compared with female mammoth skeletons.
that's great; the excerpt you posted, however, was phrased as a 'gotcha' -- as in, 'you thought i was talking about a gene, but in fact i was talking about a sex'
>that's great; the excerpt you posted, however, was phrased as a 'gotcha' -- as in, 'you thought i was talking about a gene, but in fact i was talking about a sex'
If you have an issue with that, I suggest you take it up with David Eagleman[0].
I made it very clear (in the first sentence of my comment in fact, as I mentioned previously) what I was talking about.
A dead male and a dead female have roughly proportional strength. And seeing as how there's no wooly mammoths walking around anymore, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that all of them died at some point or another
Or, do they have it wrong, sexing creatures? Seems the far simpler explanation.
Further the 'explanation' that males might have taken more risks, explains nothing. The one common denominator between every single mammal from ancient times is, they are all dead. It doesn't matter how; all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record. A disparity would have to explain how male skeletons died in precisely the right way to be preserved more often. Which seems like nonsense.
> "It doesn't matter how; all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record."
This is false. Most skeletons decompose. Only some happen to end up in the right spot to remain intact long enough to become fossils. Also, these mammoth remains aren't fossilized, they aren't old enough. These are just remains that have been preserved.
Ok, how about "represented in equal numbers in the fossil record". Leading to the main point: why would male skeletons happen to be preserved more often? Any ideas? That involve science, not guesses about impossible-to-measure Mastadon behavior.
> all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record
Why do you think this? It is not a true statement.
Not all skeletons get fossilised - it requires a fairly particular set of conditions. It may be (likely is according to the people studying it) the case that males got into these conditions more frequently than females.
You're the one claiming 'all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record' - why don't you start saying why and back that up with some actual science!
See this, from a high school science teacher, for an overview. TL;DR rapid burial in high mineral content soil creates the best chance of fossilization
And how about the locations female Mastadons choose for giving birth, raising calves - do they preserve remains? The OP seems a careless off-hand analysis, if it doesn't go more than skin-deep into behavior differences.
Worse than that. This is “I can use basic, uninformed reasoning to work through a complex, highly domain specific problem”. Usually people who think they know more are at least able to face the facts when it’s clear that they don’t. This group of people know that they don’t know as much, but believe their “superior” intellect can’t make up for it...
Oh get over yourself. Its a "That doesn't seem to answer anything" comment. If the paleontologists had an answer, why are they making flippant comments and un-founded guesses?
Again, just what I wrote. Guessing mastadon behavior, extrapolated from what living mastodon? Speculating on behavior vs probability of ending in the fossil record - is that a thing? Where has that been studied? Ignoring risks taken by female mastadons - giving birth, defending calves. Are those part of the behavior group that affects likelihood of fossilization? Nothing in this (soft) article about that.
Let's be totally honest. Paleontologists have make astronomical errors in interpreting probabilities and statistics in the past.
No, its a typical thought-provoking "Why haven't they addressed the central topic?" Just some hand-waving. Without understanding Mastadon behavior male vs female, there's no conclusion to be made.
