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Comment by InitialLastName | Hacker News Reader

Are you judging that from the one photo of a 10,000 year old preserved carcass that looks like a baby elephant?

I don't know what features elephants use to tell their calves apart, but in an alternate universe I would bet that elephants would say the same about a 10,000 old preserved carcass of a baby Homo Habilis and us.

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Yes, and from being somewhat familiar with the behavior of elephants. I'm not saying my hunch has any basis to it, but if I was thinking about investing in Colossal Biosciences, calf rejection from the birth mother would be very low on my list of concerns.

In that alternate universe, I suspect that 99% of mothers would not just leave their newly birthed baby out in the elements to die if it happened to be a homo habilis

Is there any evidence of this sort of acceptance between African and Asian elephants (say, in zoos)? I wouldn't be surprised if that had been attempted, and they appear further removed from one another than mammoths and Asian elephants are.

There was a zoo crossbred elephant. I think Motty was its name. It didn’t survive long after birth. But it shows that African and Asian elephants will breed at least, which implies they’d probably raise a mismatched calf.

Asian and African elephants are both commonly carriers for a virus (different strains of EEHV) which is very deadly to elephant calves of the other species. They used to be housed together more often before zoologists figured this out.

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