Which modern elephant species is genetically the woolly mammoth's closest living relative?

The Asian elephant

Despite superficial similarities to the African elephant in terms of sheer size, genetic sequencing has definitively established that the woolly mammoth (*Mammuthus primigenius*) shares its closest living lineage with the Asian elephant (*Elephas maximus*). Genetic studies confirm that the evolutionary split separating the woolly mammoth lineage from the Asian elephant occurred more recently than the split separating it from the African elephant lineage. This close genetic relationship is further quantified by the fact that woolly mammoths shared approximately 99% of their functional genes with the modern Asian elephant, which is the primary reason why current de-extinction research focuses on editing the Asian elephant genome.