How the Giraffe Got Its Long Neck

Africa’s majestically bizarre leaf-eating giraffe once served as an elite status symbol. Even from early civilizations, images of the giraffe are etched and sketched into the rock all over Africa. Puzzling over how the giraffe got its long neck and gentle behavior, the giraffe was the prize of Kings.

In 46 BC, Julius Caesar brought the first giraffe into Europe. Seeming to blend the characteristics of the camel and leopard, the Romans named the giraffe a “cameleopard.” Caesar presented giraffes to lions in Roman arenas to shred and shock audiences.

The first captured African giraffe arrived in China In 1414. To the Chinese Emperor Zhu Di of the Ming dynasty, the giraffe served as a sign of heavenly blessing. Al-Ashraf Qaitbay, the Burji Sultan of Egypt 1487, gifted a giraffe to Lorenzo de’ Medici of Italy.

Charles X, the king of France, was gifted a giraffe by Muhammad Ali of Egypt in 1827. For 18 years, the king proudly showed the giraffe to his guests.

The giraffe captured the mysterious ways of nature. For Charles Darwin, however, the giraffe seemed to capture the essence of evolution –

“The giraffe, by its lofty stature, much elongated neck, fore-legs, head, and tongue, has its whole frame beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees.”

Darwin’s story of how the giraffe got its long neck is one of the most popular and widely-told stories used to explain evolution.

Reaching Higher

By “slight, successive changes,” Darwin argued in The Origin of Species, the elongated neck gives the giraffe a competitive advantage for the tree-top leaves. As Darwin explains –

“With the giraffe, the continued preservation of the individuals of some extinct high-reaching ruminant, which had the longest necks, legs, &c., and could browse a little above the average height, and the continued destruction of those which could not browse so high would have sufficed for the production [speciation] of this remarkable quadruped.”

Given the giraffe’s historical legacy, explaining the evolution of the giraffe was essential. However, Darwin never observed giraffes in their native habitats. There is no record of any giraffe observations in his field Notebooks while on the HMS Beagle, and Darwin never traveled beyond the shores of Britain again.

Darwin essentially plagiarized the work of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a French biologist, to explain how the giraffe got its long neck with a different twist. In 1809, Lamarck argued for his “use and disuse” theory presented in “Philosophie Zoologique.” Over time, Lamarck argued, by straining (use) to reach high branches with leaves, the giraffe eventually developed longer necks and legs.

At the University of California, Berkeley, the website entitled Understanding Evolution, the giraffe serves as an example of evolution. The site compares Lamarck’s theory to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, noting –

“If a giraffe stretched its neck for leaves, for example, a “nervous fluid” would flow into its neck and make it longer. Its offspring would inherit the longer neck, and continued stretching would make it longer still over several generations. Meanwhile, organs that organisms stopped using would shrink.”

UCB’s site, however, does not mention what methods of observations and testing Lamarck and Darwin used – because there were none.

Neck-Stretching Leaf-Eating Theory

By the late twentieth century, however, evolution scientists began testing Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theory on how the giraffe got its long neck theory.

The availability of leaves in Africa is seasonal. As the heat intensifies in summer, the competition for fewer and fewer leaves escalates from smaller leaf eaters, especially on the lower-level leaves, it seemed.

Since giraffes can use their competitive neck-stretching advantage to reach the leaves growing higher in the trees, they have a survival advantage. But is that true? Lamarck and Darwin used reasoning since neither had observed giraffes in their native environments.

Robert E Simmons of Uppsala University, Sweden, and Lue Scheepers of the Ministry of Environment, Namibia, however, found Darwin’s and Lamarck’s reasoning flawed. In their paper entitled “Winning by a Neck: Sexual Selection in the Evolution of Giraffe,” notes –

“[W]e find that during the dry season (when feeding competition should be the most intense) giraffes generally feed on low shrubs, not tall trees… Each result suggests that long necks did not evolve specifically for feeding at higher levels… We thus find little critical support for the Darwinian feeding competition idea.”

Their report, published in The American Naturalist (1996), undermines both Lamarck and Darwin’s neck-stretching leaf-eating theory. During the dry season, the giraffes migrate to new areas rather than stretching to reach leaves higher in the trees. According to Simmons –

“[G]iraffe spend almost all of the dry season feeding on low Grewia bushes, while only in the wet season do they turn to tall Acacia tortillas trees when new leaves are …plentiful …and no competition is expected. This behavior is contrary to the prediction that giraffe should use their feeding height to advantage at times of food scarcity.”

Horizontal, Not Reaching

In the search for how the giraffe got its long neck, Simmons, and Scheppers, unexpectedly observed no neck-stretching to reach tree-top leaves. Instead, they observed giraffes foraging while postured in the horizontal or bent-down position. As explained –

“Females spend over 50% of their time feeding with their necks horizontal [a behavior so common it is used to determine the sex of animals at a distance]…. both sexes feed faster and most often with their necks bent.”

In conclusion, therefore, Simmons and Scheppers note that the “long necks did not evolve specifically for feeding at higher levels,” as once predicted by Lamarck and Darwin.

Migration

To test how the giraffe got its long neck, Yvonnick Le Pendu of Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Brazil, and Isabelle Ciofolo, of Communauté de Communes des Trois Vallées, France, directly observed giraffe movements in their native environments. In their paper entitled “Seasonal movements of giraffes in Niger” found giraffes migrate long distances to forage “by direct observation during 15 months.”

Published in the Journal of Tropical Ecology (1999), Pendu and Ciofolo reported long seasonal distance migrations of up to nearly 200 miles. As they explain –

“Long-distance movements of such length have never been reported before.”

Building on the observations of Le Pendu and Ciofolo, German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute, in the book entitled “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe” (2011) examined Lamarck and Darwin’s explanation of how the giraffe got its long neck. Concluding, Lönnig notes –

“Giraffes do not remain in a defined, narrowly bounded region and stretch their necks ever higher until all the leaves are consumed… but rather often migrate over long distances.”

The late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Columbia University wasted no words of conciliation for the once most popular and widely-told stories in the evolution industry –

“No data from giraffes then [in Darwin’s time] existed to support one theory of causes over another, none exist now… Giraffes provide no established evidence for the mode of evolution of their undeniably useful necks.”

Darwin’s dilemma intensifies, the gaffe answer to “How the giraffe got its long neck” exemplifies what happens when following his doomed advice –

“Let your theory guide your observations.”

Genesis

Despite Darwin’s disdain in The Origin of Species, followed by more than 150 years of unprecedented scientific efforts in the history of science, the scientific evidence observed in with advanced technologies nature continues to be compatible with the Genesis record, as written by Moses.