Scientists propose that wolves may have domesticated themselves into dogs by choosing to stay near humans for food and selecting mates with similar tameness preferences. A new statistical model demonstrates this self-domestication could have occurred over 15,000 years through natural selection, challenging previous assumptions about human-driven domestication.
UNC-Chapel Hill researchers discovered that loggerhead sea turtles can learn and remember specific magnetic signatures associated with feeding locations, demonstrating their ability to create a magnetic map. The study reveals two distinct mechanisms for magnetic navigation in turtles - a map sense for location and a compass sense for direction - which may have evolved separately.
Research published in Science reveals that humpback whale songs exhibit Zipf's law, a linguistic pattern previously only observed in human languages where word frequencies follow a predictable distribution. The discovery suggests that cultural learning mechanisms shared between humans and whales lead to similar structural patterns in their communication systems, despite vast evolutionary differences.