New study suggests Borneo’s had elephants for thousands of years

The backstory behind the world’s smallest elephants has always been something of a mystery. For one thing, scientists aren’t sure exactly when — and how — Bornean pygmy elephants got to the island of Borneo from other parts of Asia. A 2003 probe into their genetics found that they’ve been genetically distinct from their closest elephant cousins for 300,000 years and could have arrived in Borneo some time after that point. Another conjecture has been that they’re a feral population descended from elephants introduced by humans only a few hundred years ago. Now, a new study published on Jan. 17 in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that they’ve been in Borneo since the end of the Pleistocene, around 11,000 to 18,000 years ago, when Borneo was part of a much larger land mass. “The elephants in Borneo are much more than an introduced population and are not coming from a few introduced individuals,” said Benoit Goossens, a wildlife biologist, director of the Danau Girang Field Centre in Malaysian Borneo and co-author of the paper. “Elephants have been there for thousands of years, and they are Bornean.” Elephant cow and her offspring in a palm oil plantation in the Kinabatangan. Photo courtesy of Rudi Delvaux. The study used far-reaching genetic data gleaned from nearly 800 DNA samples collected for an earlier study. The team then compared that information to a series of statistical models covering different historical scenarios for the elephants. From that comparison, they discovered that Borneo’s elephants passed through a…

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