Italian Bears Living Near Villages Have Evolved to Be Smaller and Less Agressive

My best guess is that the short snout trait is in linkage with something else that is actually what is being selected upon. At least for racoons.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

Something something autodomestication...

I watched the video ourmandave pointed us to where NessieExplains points out what she says are flaws in the study suggesting raccoons are becoming domesticated:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1

The data set and the code used to analyze the data are at https://osf.io/56xcg/overview.

Her criticisms and conclusions may well be correct, but her video is really just her saying her conclusions are correct. She downloaded the data and did her own analysis and points to results in her spreadsheets. It all flies by quite quickly. We have to take her word for it. She also made a snarky comment about this line in the R code:

  # 57% Let’s see what we can do to change that!

  # what if we remove those pictures that we had issues measuring?
  # that would be gbifIDs: 4855527033, 4096474261, 2311326414, 4528316516
  # Vector of IDs to exclude - the image quality was too bad after all
  ids_to_exclude <- c(4855527033, 4096474261, 4528316516, 2311326414)

She says in the video that she’s an actual raccoon biologist. According to her web site she is pursuing a master’s in biology (nessieexplains.com/about-nessie-explains/) although there is no date on the page, so she may have completed the degree already.

As I say, she may well be correct, but I have no way of knowing.

https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/animals-who-have-adapted-live...

Maybe it's just that many of the large aggressive bears living near villages have just been shot or scared away, but the genetics is unchanged and the offspring of large aggressive bears currently living away from villages have no aversion to trying their luck in the village ?

If there's a range of "how aggressive a bear can be", and it's mostly driven by genetics, and aggression is heavily selected against in the environment? Then you can get a considerable reduction in aggression in the span of as little as a few generations. Bear generation time is what, 5 years? They coexisted with humans for a long time now.

Now, traits with weaker genetic components (i.e. if bear aggression is only 50% genetic) can take much longer. Even more so for traits with low variance, or highly complex traits and behaviors. But evolution isn't always slow. Certain changes can happen quickly.